


Lectisternium

by faridsgwi



Series: Auspex [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical The Beholding Content (The Magnus Archives), Child Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Mystery, Period Typical Attitudes, Self-Esteem Issues, The Magnus Institute (The Magnus Archives)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 73,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27445804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faridsgwi/pseuds/faridsgwi
Summary: London, 1849.As the Entities ascend in power, plots are set in motion, new friends are made, and an apprentice archive utterly fails to keep those new friends at arms length.*Perhaps if they were under his auspices, Jon would be able to keep his assistants away from the worst of it. He could certainly try.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonah Magnus & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: Auspex [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1974427
Comments: 292
Kudos: 243





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Sorry for the longer wait, I'm very busy, but I was working on it steadily the whole time. Good news: this series has a planned ending! It should have one more main (long) work in it, maybe a few extras. Thank you again to Luunyscarlet and everyone else for their supportive comments and ideas!!! 
> 
> Individual CWs will be placed in the chapters they apply to when they're relevant, so they don't spoil the story. More general warnings are available in the overall end notes.

Something was extremely strange about Tim's new job.

In fairness, he had set out searching for the strange. After he had lost his brother he had gone to the police, private investigators, spiritualists, even a few secret societies, and he'd seen plenty of weird things, but none that had given him any answers. He had thought the Magnus Institute might be able to do that. When he had seen a notice advertising for an assistant role at a scholarly establishment belonging to Jonah Magnus - a name he knew in connection to that of Smirke, and appearing in all manner of unnatural tales - he had seized upon it immediately, but he had thought that either his lack of education or the fact that his only experience was as a lithographer probably would mean that he'd have to fight tooth and nail for the position, turn up his charm as high as it would go. And yet, Tim had been hired after only the briefest of interviews with Magnus himself; he remembered the encounter hazily, as though in a dream, but he was fairly certain he had signed a contract, been shown briefly around the Institute, and told where he might be expected to live, all on that one same day. Apparently another of the new assistants had been set up in the same place: _best not to be alone_ , Mister Magnus had said, lips curling up in a private joke. That was the first of the oddness about the place itself that had really caught Tim's notice. It was far from the last.

(Jonah Magnus wasn't a mannequin, Tim was pretty sure. He looked every bit the gentleman; ageing a little, perhaps, but otherwise the very image of prim propriety and fashion, nothing like the so clearly otherworldly, uncanny _thing_ that had been below Covent Garden. What was unsettling about Magnus was far more subtle and took far longer for Tim to wrap his head around. He was a terrifying man, but of the sort where you didn't notice how scared you had been until long after he had left.)

Day to day, the work of preserving and filing statements or investigating their particulars might have been boring, if the contents of the statements hadn't been so outright bizarre. Many were nonsensical, others blatantly imagined or false, but some were... less so. Enough had the hallmarks of what Tim was beginning to learn were the true horrors: the air of shifted reality, the not-quite or no-longer people, the places that should not have been, and the constant, pervading terror, both preceded and inspired by them. _That_ was what he had endeavoured to discover, those terrible things that lurked beneath and around the normal world. Yet he was, apparently, expected to just put each abomination neatly in its box and note down any connections to others, any evidence, any _survivors_ \- not to try and understand or fight. They had objects in storage as well, but he had been warned by his stricken-faced colleague that the _artefacts_ were best left locked well away, for his own safety never touched. Any weird books especially were _never_ to be read without first consulting the archivist.

And that was the strangest thing of all, that the archivist was nowhere to be found. If he truly existed at all he must have been nocturnal, because the only people that Tim had met were archival assistants, and one of them only very briefly. Not that he was unhappy working with Martin, of course. Martin was the same at work as in their shared lodgings, wary at first but personable, very determined to be helpful, slightly clumsy. He had been employed at the Institute only a few weeks longer than Tim, as it turned out, but that was long enough to show him the ropes, and Tim was glad of it. For all their relative lack of supervision down in the dingy basement that held the archives, Tim could never seem to escape the invasive feeling there that he was being watched, and judged, and found to be inadequate. Around Martin he felt a little less surveilled.

Which was probably why he hadn’t questioned how Martin knew what their assigned tasks were every day for near a month. Not until now, anyway.

They were in the archives proper, away from their desks and in among the needless rows of bookshelves and indexes, when it abruptly occurred to Tim to ask Martin where he was getting their instruction from, hands stalling on a copy of _A Natural History of Lycanthropy_. So he did.

Martin blinked back at him, caught off-guard by the question.

“...From Jon?”

“Which Jon?”

Evidently he had lost Martin.

“You met him,” said Martin, slowly, confused and testing. “When you were first being shown around - I suppose he made himself scarce pretty quickly, but -”

“No, I mean, Jon the archivist, the boss, or young Jon, about our age?”

Martin’s face twitched in a way that Tim couldn’t read.

“Both?” he said, a little strangled. “They’re the same person.”

But the Jon he had met couldn’t be any older than… than Danny would have been. The thought of his brother evaporated any levity that might have arisen, reminding Tim why he was there in the first place.

Jon was a twig of a teenager, all elbows and knees, dressed smartly and morosely but with his hair all a mess, and with a scowl fixed permanently on his face to one degree or another. He had given Tim a desultory handshake at their first, and only proper meeting; when they made eye contact, though, Jon had quite suddenly turned white, mumbled some excuse about finishing writing a letter as he darted around Tim and fled. At the time, Tim had merely taken him for shy. Martin certainly talked about Jon warmly enough, and Tim had caught occasional glimpses of him at a distance as Jon scurried in and out of the archives, seeming very harried. Presumably all of Jon’s time was occupied working for the archivist and he would calm down eventually.

The archivist’s office, on the other hand, had always just appeared to be empty.

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Frustration bubbled up in Tim. “Is there a problem with me?”

“That’s not-”

“Well, he turned tail and ran, Martin. If it didn’t seem so ridiculous then I’d say he’s been avoiding me ever since, too.”

Tim’s tone of voice made it fairly clear that he didn’t actually think it ridiculous at all. Martin grimaced, but stood his ground - though he did not do so convincingly. For such a tall person, he never seemed to think to use his height to loom over anyone.

“It’s fine,” he said, tone firm, words explaining absolutely nothing. “Mister Magnus keeps him busy, and he… he has his reasons.”

Martin was far too sweet, too prepared to look for the best in these situations, Tim decided, doubts unassuaged. Either that or he was in on it. For the moment, Tim returned his attention to the index card for _metamorphoses_ he had been gesturing with, and let the gears turn in his mind as he gathered up the books listed on it.

A few minutes later, by the time he and Martin had their encyclopaedias laid out for examination and the lamps in the dim archives turned as bright as they would go, he had more questions ready.

“Even ignoring how weird he’s being toward me,” Tim began, wilfully breezing past the resigned little sigh that Martin gave. “Don’t you think it’s unusual for Jon to have such a high position at his age? I mean, he’s younger than either of us.”

Martin kept his eyes resolutely on the cramped print below them and didn’t dignify the question with a response - although Tim saw his freckled nose scrunch in mild exasperation. Tim resorted to shock tactics.

“…is he Magnus’s son?”

There: Martin raised his curly head, startled.

“What?! No, he’s n- Tim, they don’t share a name.”

Tim shrugged pointedly.

“On the wrong side of the sheets, maybe?”

Neither of them could help but look around, checking that they weren’t being overhead gossiping instead of concentrating at their work. But Magnus usually signalled his physical presence with a great deal of pomp, and Tim had decided that the eerie sense of constant observation was merely a feeling that the architecture gave you down here, that was all.

“Still no,” Martin hissed, voice lowered, posture a little defensive. “They don’t even look alike, for heaven’s sake.”

That was true, actually. Magnus had alarming grey eyes to Jon’s deep brown, and his smug air would look horribly out of place on Jon’s angular face.

“Alright,” Tim conceded. “But Jon _does_ live in his house.”

Martin waved that off immediately.

“He’s just Magnus’s apprentice.”

As soon as the words left his lips he winced, regretting it; Tim could pinpoint the precise moment that Martin realised how odd that declaration was. He leaned across the desk toward Martin, who leaned back as though he could not easily tower above Tim if he wished.

“But apprentice as _what_ ?” he pressed. “It’s not as though Mister Magnus is an archivist himself, he’s just a toff who _owns_ an archive.”

“Um, I - listen, I think it made more sense when he first hired Jon, just as a, uh, boy. And that was a good few years ago, and now Jon has skills, so he didn’t let him go - ah, he kept him on.”

Mentally, Tim noted down _didn’t let him go_ as possibly the most suspicious phrase that anyone had ever said, even if it wasn’t directly connected to any circus. There was, more importantly, something in Martin’s tone of voice that told him that they were referring to more than just archival experience.

“ _Skills_? What kind of skills?”

For a moment it looked almost as though Martin was considering just spilling the truth. But then a flash of what Tim might have called guilt came across his expression, and looked determinedly back down to his book, jotting down the word _sorcerers_ like that counted as productively working.

Still, Tim knew he was close to cracking him.

“Oh, no, Martin, you can’t just refuse to answer. Jon’s the _archivist_ , and he’s acting shady toward me in particular, and _you_ know why, and you won’t tell me? And I’m supposed to accept that?”

“Tim, shh-”

“I refuse.”

“It’s - I mean, it’s complicated,”

“I bet!”

“No, Tim, I-I really can’t-”

“Come on.”

“It’s not fair to him to-”

“Martin, I swear, if you don’t tell me then I’ll never stop asking about it. At home, too.”

“Um…”

“And I’ll find out eventually!”

Tim shut his (completely ignored) book with a dramatic, final _snap_ , sure that the threat of constant irritation would be enough.

Martin bit his lip and fell silent. Then he seemed to come reluctantly to a decision, and opened his mouth to speak.

*

Tim found himself storming into the Head Archivist’s office, disbelief and glee warring in him at the perfect, insane, explanation that he had found.

Jon, resembling nothing more than a grumpy kitten, startled to his feet as the door banged open, staring up in shock at him, and Tim heard himself say:

“You’re psychic?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please also enjoy this doodle of Jonah Magnus and young Jon :)  
> 


	2. Elucidate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon's interlude between Theoxenia and Lectisternium.
> 
> I'll stop reminding, but warnings will be in the end notes from now on!

It had never been in Jon’s nature to relax. Peace was something he regarded primarily with suspicion, waiting either for the other foot to drop and shatter the illusion, or for it to dissolve naturally again into motion, never more than a momentary reprieve. He liked to be busy; work was fulfilling, healthy, and it kept his mind from wandering. Routine was better than chaos - and if his routine was one that drove him to exhaustion, then, well, he was accustomed to far too little sleep.

He had managed to have a few days of quiet, though. It was more than Jon had learned to expect, and he was wary of it, caught in introspection of his own cautious happiness as he and Martin eased carefully back into a life that involved human contact and only the usual amount of fog. But Mister Magnus had left them alone, occupied or out on business and therefore mercifully unable to meet with Jon, and the days passed comfortably. He began to show Martin the ins and outs of the Institute, delegate the simpler tasks to him; Martin, for his part, took the unusual nature of their investigations in stride, and, helpfully, reminded Jon to eat at the relevant intervals. They talked, sat and read, and slept in Jon’s bed together, awkwardly at first but always gladly. It was… unexpectedly nice.

Still, Jon hadn’t been surprised when Mister Magnus had called for him. Every other idyll he had known so far had ended, usually abruptly. It was only correct that this would too, and at least this meant no more waiting.

He was alone in his office, down in the corner of the archives, when he felt the gaze of the Ceaseless Watcher intensify without warning, enough to temporarily paralyse him. As he inhaled sharply he heard the footsteps of Magnus’s secretary on the stone steps down to the basement, coming to deliver a familiar message. At least Martin was working upstairs in the library, that day, so Jon wouldn’t have to walk past him.

Usually, Jon jumped up immediately at the feeling of a summons and met the messenger at the entrance to the archives. That day, however, he hesitated at his desk, no other thought in his head but to delay the inevitable. He had briefly seen - or thought he had seen - the shining possibility of acting on his own impulses, using the Beholding outside of Magnus’s research, and now the consequences of that were his to face. Selfish to try at all: Jon was nobody, a tool, and the idea that such power should be put to his pathetic sympathies was ridiculous. Of course Mister Magnus had reasons to leave people where they were. Of course he would be angry.

Jon sighed tightly, adjusted his cuffs, and pushed himself to stand up. There was no point in resistance. Foolish to even pause, really, since that might be seen as tantamount to reluctance.

He opened the door just in time to startle the secretary on the other side, whose fist was raised to knock. The man blinked a little at Jon - who had been attempting, and evidently failing, to affix an expression of unperturbed calm to his face - and handed him the note, and Jon, as usual, mutely nodded his thanks and obeyed without reading it.

Magnus was in his office at the top floor of his Institute, not at home. A long climb from the basement. On the stairs Jon passed stray curators, librarians, administrators, the handful of other Institute employees - all hired on a strictly temporary basis, no one that was truly tied to the Eye as he was tied. He couldn’t put a name to any of the faces, though naturally they all recognised him.

Jon was tense as he stood waiting outside, tense as he knocked, tenser still as he stepped cautiously inside, the unease of their last meeting not yet dispersed. When he looked up, however, he saw Mister Magnus quite relaxed at his desk, mild expression on his face.

“Good afternoon, Jonathan.”

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Come here, boy, I have an itinerary for you.” Mister Magnus didn’t bother obfuscating or ignoring the cause of the tension, but for reasons Jon couldn’t figure, his tone was still light; friendly, even. “I hope you’ve had enough time to recover from your experience with Forsaken?”

Jon just nodded, taking up his usual position before the desk. Magnus did not stop reclining and get to work, though.

“And how is young mister Blackwood getting on?”

Jon hesitated, on edge.

“Very well, sir,” he had to admit, keeping his voice low; genuinely very well, despite the occasionally frustrating lack of experience. Martin was more dogged than he might initially be taken for, and it gave him a talent for research. “The environment suits him.”

Magnus hummed, pleased, finally leaning forward to catch Jon’s eye.

“Good. Such a shame that the boy had to come at the cost of the Lukases’ goodwill,” he continued, the words weighted. “But I will admit that there was a certain amount of fun in seeing them so irritated by it. There are more dangerous things in the world than Peter Lukas, after all.”

Jon couldn’t find words - not the right ones, anyway. He had been prepared to grovel, to swallow his pride, not to find his master so forgiving. The dissonance between what he had expected and what was happening was too great. There would have been some relief, at least, if Mister Magnus had simply beaten him, rather than left him suspended in this unnerving inbetween; perhaps he still would.

“Of course,” Magnus continued easily, as though Jon had responded. “You know, Jon, that the reason for my insistance that you don’t attempt to interfere with other Powers has always been because I don’t want you actively targeted by their servants.

He waved off an objection Jon never would have been bold enough to give voice to like it had been said aloud.

“Oh, yes, you may have had a few minor run-ins with them before, but that was all in the name of education, or else someone’s idea of a joke. Not to mention all the occasions on which an encounter has been entirely the result of you wandering into dangerous places by yourself, and bringing an incident down on your own head. The Eye is powerful - _I_ am powerful - but defensive, primarily, unlike a great deal of those others whose wrath you might attract. I had to take certain steps to protect my heir.”

Jon’s head snapped up at _that_ word, but Magnus was already breezing past it to other issues.

“Nevertheless, don’t think I haven’t noticed your attitude toward my hiring of your little friend. You couldn’t think I had some other motive, could you?”

He saw Jon’s wide eyes and set jaw, and clucked his tongue in disapproval. His voice was chiding, unsurprised.

“Such a narcissist, Jon. Honestly, why would I go to all the trouble of taking on another employee just to punish you? There are easier ways to do that.”

Jon tried not to shudder; there certainly were.

“You can make sure Martin is useful to me. That’s all.”

At the edge of his brain, Jon could feel an insistent push, the feeling of knowledge threatening to just appear within it against his will. He knew, as ever, that if he didn’t choose to accept the truth, then Mister Magnus would simply force him to do so.

He didn’t want his master in his mind. What he might see in there - Jon’s other guilty, mutinous thoughts; not to mention how he felt about the damn cat, how he felt about _Martin_ \- was too sensitive, too dangerous.

So he accepted it.

Of course Mister Magnus was protecting him. Having an assistant would only help him, of course. Jon nodded, subdued, not meeting his eyes.

“I’ve had a dozen or so notices posted up asking for more applications, as well. There’s been a good deal of activity around lunacy recently that I feel it’d be best for a team to handle. You’ll sign off on them.”

 _More_ assistants, that was too far - he had threatened it, but Jon hadn’t thought it would actually happen. Through the numbing dread Jon managed to find his voice again to weakly protest.

“No-”

“Jonathan, I thought that we were past this childishness,” snapped Magnus. “You believe in this work, do you not? You wish to operate as efficiently and productively as possible? To do your duty to me?”

Jon faltered, and Magnus’s tone became considering, warm.

“It’s past time you were given the kind of responsibility you’re ready for, anyway, Jonathan. The archival assistants will be bound to the Eye through you, only indirectly to me and my Institute. I trust you.”

Stupidly hopeful, Jon’s heart jumped in his throat.

Perhaps, if they were under his auspices, then Jon would be able to keep them away from the worst of it. He could certainly try. Most of the employees of the Magnus Institute led perfectly ordinary lives, after all, and maybe he could ensure these new assistants would too; surely if he made sure that their work was satisfactory to Mister Magnus then they would be left unbothered, and Jon could protect them as well as obey his master.

And Magnus had said he _trusted_ him. Jon tried to force down his emotions.

“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “Yes - thank you, sir.”

“Very good. These are the plans for the next - ah, just one more thing, actually. I strongly suggest that Mister Blackwood be sent to live with one of the new archival assistants. Constant company is the best thing to stave away the Lonely, after all.”

Jon had turned eagerly back to work, glad to move the conversation to another topic - but he recoiled at that, turning the order in his head as he struggled with it. The pause drew Mister Magnus’s attention, and he arched at eyebrow at Jon.

“Unless, of course, you have any good reason to keep him close?”

There wasn’t a _good_ reason, no. The thought of Martin living under the same roof as Magnus had been distressing him enormously. Eventually, Jon was certain, Martin being there would just be too much of a temptation to resist, and it would lead somewhere terrible. Magnus would want to put him through hell just to Watch it, or worse, to leverage his friendship with Jon to tighten his iron control over both of them. It was selfish to want Martin to stay: Jon was putting him in danger.

But he didn’t want to lose him. Jon hated with every fibre of his being to admit it, but he was the first friend he had ever had. Martin was soft, and kind, and he had a warm and private smile that made something twist in Jon’s chest. He had woken Jon up from his nightmares, that morning, and held him close while he calmed from them. No one had ever done that before.

“No,” Jon forced himself to say. “No, sir, I have no objections.”

And like that, his brief peace had been dissolved, his routine had been shattered. It was for the best that he accept the chances - the new people, Martin being sent away - but also for the best that he keep himself isolated from them as much as possible.

Jon saw the hurt looks that Martin sent him no matter how much he tried to conceal them. And he knew how curious the first new hire was, too - but Jon was eager to keep his distance from Tim. He seemed nice enough, somehow elegant even in a drab, mismatched plaid suit and striped shirt, dark hair pushed back in waves around his ears, and Martin liked him.

But as they shook hands at that first meeting he had looked directly into Tim’s eyes and thought _clown_ , been overwhelmed with memories of an eye-wateringly bright silk costume, two red diamonds of flayed flesh decorating a grease-painted white face, a hungry, soulless grin, his brother’s empty body stretched across a doll. He felt for a sudden flash what Tim did: stark terror of the Stranger, grim determination below his sincerely friendly smile, sickening guilt tinged with fraternal love. Jon couldn’t help but run from it.

Unfortunately, Tim apparently did not stand for secrets, and Jon’s attempts to escape him only raised more questions. Jon should really have anticipated him cornering Martin.

He did not, however, blame himself for failing to anticipate Tim shoving unannounced into his office, with such violent enthusiasm that the door slammed into the wall. Jon jolted up in shock - confusion, though, not fear, because Tim’s body language held no threat, only slightly hysterical excitement.

“You’re psychic?!”

Jon’s mind stuttered to a halt and ceased function, gaze snapping to Martin’s more distant face in annoyed betrayal. His denial caught temporarily in his throat.

“No!” he tried, too stumbling to be even a little convincing.

Tim’s smile grew, paying no attention to Martin edging past him to nervously close the door. Definitely manic.

“You so are! You’re a psychic!”

“I’m not a psychic, Tim,” Jon insisted, far too quickly. “They’re all dreadful charlatans, it’s not like that.”

“What is it like, then?”

He could see the images at the forefront of Tim’s mind: levitation, crystal balls, tarot cards. Jon bristled, irritated despite himself. _A psychic,_ ugh.

“I just… Know things.”

Too late, Jon realised he had all but admitted it. Tim’s fascination hadn’t ebbed; it had something less of an edge of crazy to it now, eyebrows raised expectantly. Martin was still cringing beside him. But Martin already knew all this, he wasn’t the one that Jon was letting bait him into putting in danger. This was childish, he shouldn’t allow himself to -

“Know something about me,” demanded Tim, cutting across Jon’s train of thought.

 _Clown_ , thought Jon again, that terrible face rising unbidden in his mind again, nausea along with it. _Danny’s skin over something that wasn’t Danny._

On noticing Jon’s expression, Tim altered his approach.

“Something simple. What’s my middle name?”

“Jordan,” Jon answered instantly, automatically. “It was going to be James, but your mother changed her mind, decided to save it.”

His mouth shut before he could say _she made James Danny’s middle name instead._

Tim’s glee was fading as he stared, and he asked again, more intent.

“What’s… Martin’s middle name?”

“He doesn’t have one, he just signs with a ‘K’ because it sounds better,” said Jon immediately - and then frowned, not having actually known that before, and slightly offended at it. Martin grimaced apologetically.

Tim was silent for a long moment; unsure of his position now, Jon balled his hands into fists and tried to soften his expression.

“You could have looked that up, somehow,” Tim said, eventually. “You could have… seen it on a contract, or guessed.”

“I could.”

Neither of them took the way out that they had both acknowledged.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Jon asked, trying to recover his composure. “You, and Martin, a-and whoever else _he_ finds to work here, I suppose. You have to keep it a secret. Knowledge is… it can be dangerous.”

There was no way he’d be able to keep either of them at arm’s length after this, Jon was sure.

“I won’t tell, boss,” Tim agreed smoothly, apparently coming to some satisfying decision within himself.

A decision that apparently involved him _touching Jon_ , reaching across the desk to clap him on the shoulder with a winning smile. It seemed the knowledge that Jon was young and _psychic_ and awkward was enough to overwhelm any sense of propriety. Tim’s waistcoat really was astonishingly garish, Jon noticed as he blinked owlishly at him, even more so at such close a distance.

Martin looked very pleased.

Jon felt… strange. Simultaneously happy and frightened and utterly convinced this was going to be terrible. It felt a little like falling from a great height.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Emotional abuse, including extensive gaslighting and implied threat toward others  
> \- Referenced physical abuse  
> \- Tim's backstory with the Stranger


	3. Enshroud

Sasha's back was killing her. No matter how she tried to concentrate on her prospective new employer, the thought of the pain in her chest dulled her sense of time and space, the questions he asked and even the answers she gave slipping unnoticed past her, as though in a trance.

Her answers should be satisfactory, she was certain of it, if not the fact that they came from her mouth. She had prepared carefully for this, she knew all there was to know of both the subject and the post, and she was as qualified as a woman in her position could be - not that that was particularly qualified. Back in Birmingham she had worked on and off in several circulating libraries, mostly employed to fill in for unexpected vacancies, then volunteered her services to a few public libraries in London. But she had still been unable to get proper work as anything other than a governess. It wasn’t that Sasha didn’t like children - of course all ladies should, and she _did_ , in theory, distantly - but just that, faced with their tantrums, their messes, their reticence to be educated, she couldn’t help but despair at the idea of continuing in such a state. She could always train as a schoolteacher, she supposed; but that meant more children, probably a more permanent position, and it was desperately not what she wanted. _This_ was what she wanted, and she knew the chances of achieving it were very low indeed.

The advertisement hadn’t specifically asked for men, true, but she had seen the way that Mister Magnus’s eyebrows had raised at the revelation that the _S. James_ who had written to him was, in fact, a young woman - even if he had then proceeded to actually interview her. A woman in a research institute. It wasn’t impossible, she told herself, it just wasn’t very likely.

Her ribs hurt so much in the position this narrow chair forced her into.

But she still managed to respond to his inquiries, polite and concise, hands folded demurely in her lap. Sasha was accustomed enough to the distracting ache to smile through it.

Magnus had fallen quiet after she gave a detailed reply on respect des fonds, one finger rubbing thoughtfully at his mustache. He wore a signet ring, she noticed, with an open, stylised eye embossed in relief into the gold. How unusual. At that angle, it seemed to be staring directly at her.

“Is there anything else I can tell you, sir?” she asked, after a few more empty moments, drawing up her courage. Underneath his vivid grey eyes she felt pierced through, like a butterfly in a case, held still to be observed.

He hummed, considering, and this time she didn’t quite have bravery sufficient to break he silence.

“Not that I can think of,” he said eventually. “You’ve quite demonstrated your skills, I believe. Where is it that I can write to you, Miss James?”

Sasha rattled off the address; his head tilted incrementally in disapproval, and he reached for paper and his inkwell.

“A little far away. I can recommend a boarding house that several of the lady employees use - entirely safe and proper, I assure you.”

“I - I don’t need that,” Sasha stammered. “Thank you, but I live with my cousin and her husband. I’m fully prepared to make the journey.”

“I see.” His hands stilled on the paper, eyebrows up. “Previously you’ve been a, ah, a private tutor, I understand? What sort of job is it that they believe you will be engaged in?”

If she had been caught off-guard before, now Sasha was entirely disarmed, lost.

“The truth, sir, of course…?”

Why would she conspire to lie to them? Why would he imply that?

“I apologise, Miss James. I merely presumed otherwise because some might see this as rather a risky job for a young lady.”

“More risky if my family had no idea what I was doing,” Sasha objected, civil, if a little too quickly.

What she didn’t say - what Magnus was gazing at her like he somehow knew - was that she had had to practically run away from her parents’ house, slipping out before dawn one morning to travel to London, and though for now her cousins allowed her to do as she wished, she could already feel their suspicions and their irritation growing. She desperately feared the inevitable, approaching day that they would decide to curtail her treasured independence again, the moment that the city which had seemed so wide and full of opportunity when she arrived would finally close in around her; she felt it like a crushing weight upon her shoulders, growing ever heavier.

Mister Magnus had already written down the name of the hostel, if not yet the address: _Farriner’s House_ , she noted mentally, just in case it became necessary for her to flee. Hopefully she wouldn’t need it.

“Well,” said Magnus, with a sudden smile that didn’t convincingly meet his eyes, and turned a contract toward her. “Although I must say it would be quite improper to consider you for an archivist’s role, I am prepared to hire you on as an assistant. A woman’s sense will occasionally be valuable around here, I’m sure.”

Sasha grit her teeth and smiled placidly. Leaning forward to take the pen was a new pain around her chest. But she had just guaranteed her employment here ‘until dismissal’, she had persuaded this man of her worth, she had won at least the right to prove herself, and that was enough to counterbalance it.

She would start work at the beginning of the next week - although if she had been allowed Sasha might have disappeared into the archives there and then - and so stood to be shown out, knowing that she should not stay away from the house without reason.

At the end of the corridor outside Mister Magnus’s office hovered a slight young man, managing somehow to look both very prissy and slightly disheveled, and almost too occupied with the reports in his hands to notice that he was no longer alone.

“Ah, Jonathan,” said Magnus, with a predatory note of happiness in his voice that she had noticed before, which sounded more like he was laughing at someone than truly pleased. The boy’s attention focused onto him with startling intensity - then, a moment later, onto Sasha.

“I must have lost track of the time. Miss James: Jonathan Sims, our Head Archivist. Jonathan: Alexandra James, the last of the new archival assistants.”

The boy seemed very taken aback, his mouth working silently for a moment before he managed simply to nod and look back down to his files. Once again, Sasha felt the customary curl of shame-anger-distress in her gut: he was so young, but he was male, and so he was qualified in a way that she could never be, and she would never rise higher than being the last and least of his subordinates. The atmosphere inside the building seemed to grow heavier, more oppressive, and she couldn’t quite concentrate on the excuse Mister Magnus gave as he slipped away, leaving the two of them hovering awkwardly outside his office. Sims said nothing, and Sasha decided simply to bob her head at him and leave. She would have to get the measure of him on Monday.

She made it to the end of the corridor before, in an audibly forced tone, the young archivist called out from behind her,

“Miss James?”

When she glanced over her shoulder Sims was hurrying to catch up with her, an expression of strange resolve on his face.

“I’m sorry, I was - um, preoccupied-” he said, still seeming fairly distracted, and struggled to shift his papers enough to extend a hand toward her. He seemed not find anything odd or overly familiar about it.

She hesitated for a moment, then took it, shaking his hand as firmly as a man might.

“I look forward to working together,” he finished, with a small and stilted smile.

The perpetual sensation of the world crushing in around her with resentment and stress eased off for a moment, faded into the air as he looked at her. It was unnerving, but with that one look Sasha felt Seen, really and genuinely Known and understood for what she was.

She walked a little easier on her way out.

*

As she left, Jon’s eyes lingered on her - curious as ever, but more than a little worried. She was bright, and skilled, and utterly terrified of being trapped; he could see it even before he touched her mind. Her long blue dress was not truly as tight as she felt that it was, and the walls of exulted rooms did not actually close in around her when it was made clear that she was not welcome within them. But her fear that they did had cast the mark of the Buried heavily over her, laying claim, no matter how she had tied herself to the Institute.

He would have more chances to ward it away while they worked together, perhaps. Another thing to remember.

Mister Magnus forgetting their meeting had delayed him in his work today, which made him fidgety: he had an old paper statement to read on some unusual effects of the doubly-diminished sixth chord, a new lead on moving paintings hidden in a back room of the National Gallery, and a malicious book posing as a yellowing copy of _The Duchess of Malfi_ to dispose of, which upon being read convinced its reader that their friends were in fact their enemies; some bastard combination of the Spiral and Lonely, as far as he could tell. Fascinating, but also in dire need of being chained safely shut, tucked away on a shelf where his unfortunate assistants ( _especially_ Martin) could never even think of touching it, and forgotten as quickly as possible. There were also some unsubstantiated reports of _something_ menacing and occasionally attacking individuals around Vauxhall, Pimlico, and Westminster that he was supposed to deal with; either a man in a fur overcoat or some sort of huge, rabid dog, depending on who was making the claim. One elderly gentleman had gone as far as to profess to being _mauled_ by it - but he had made a patently useless statement on piskies only the week before, so Jon felt comfortable admitting to quickly dismissing him. Those wounds were no more than an ordinary stray might have given him. Jon had seen nothing to convince him that the phenomenon wasn’t self-perpetuating nonsense, as of yet.

It did concern him a little that Mister Magnus seemed to be filtering the latter accounts through to him, rather than letting them arrive in the archives by the Institute’s normal channels. Still, there was a simple enough explanation for that: all the stories had sprung up in the districts of the city directly surrounding both the Institute and Magnus’s townhouse, and Magnus presumably wished to keep a close Eye on any potentially paranormal happenings in the local area. That was all, Jon told himself. Undue suspicion was ungrateful.

Another pair of eyes and another set of hands would be helpful in sorting both categories of his work, anyway, especially such capable ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Misogyny  
> \- Minor restricted breathing
> 
> 'Sasha' would be a pretty unusual name for an English woman in 1849! Not impossible, though. That's why I've made her full name Alexandra. Jon should also probably not shake her hand, not if he doesn't know her.
> 
> For clarification, Jonah Magnus is generally an asshole, but here he's being deliberately sexist to push Sasha's buttons because he's a monster who consumes fear, there isn't going to be rampant misogyny in here for no reason. Similarly, gay characters aren't going to have to deal with homophobia other than vague stuff about social stigma (they have enough issues, they get to be gay and happy).


	4. Converge

“Statement of Pierre Lorrain, inmate at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, regarding his repeated and apparently unnoticed escapes, but means of a path, or possibly a being, he calls _le labyrinthe du menteur_. Perhaps a pun on minotaur? Original statement given in the form of a letter to his sister, unsent, dated July 1799. Statement begins:

“ _Ce n’est pas cela que c’est. When I was first imprisoned here, I was not mad; I am sure of that. Now, I do not know what madness is. I cannot trust my own words, nor the words of the others around me, nor even my thoughts, the words inside my head. I cannot trust the walls which shift and roil and melt and rise. I cannot escape, but I also cannot remain, for the labyrinth has no ending from which to emerge just as it had no beginning through which to enter. There was a doorway, once. But that was not the beginning._ ”

*

“Good day, Stoker.”

“Hm? Oh, morning, Sasha!”

From another man, she wouldn’t have allowed that kind of overfamiliarity. It might have been dangerous, something he could interpret as a signal to him of some nonexistent interest, a sign that he might take liberties to which he was not entitled. But from Tim, who behaved so toward almost everyone, it was harmless, sweet. She rolled her eyes but smiled back at him at his desk as he rubbed that half-dazed look of a man emerging from a heavy and complicated tome from his face. Orange pinstripes on his waistcoat, today.

“Have you seen the archivist?”

“I have, now you ask. He’s reading a statement.”

Tim leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the desk and crossing them at the ankles. Even as she repressed the clearly sought-after smirk at his antics, Sasha felt her chest constrict. _I couldn’t do that_.

“He’s in his office, then?”

Sasha took a step toward it - but Tim made a gesture of disapproval, pulling a grimace.

“Ah, he is, but I wouldn’t bother trying to disturb him if I were you. You know how he is about the statements.”

“I… don’t, actually.”

It was sweet that Tim was affable enough to misremember that they had been dearest of bosom friends for years, but it could also be unhelpful. He seemed to forget that she had in fact only been employed at the Institute for a short matter of weeks.

“It’s,” For a moment Tim seemed to struggle for words, and failing to achieve them, settled for levity. “It’s downright spooky, is what it is. Looks like he goes into some sort of a trance, and nothing - not waving your hand in front of his face, or shaking him, or hollering - could wake him up before he’s read as much of it as he wishes. Not that I’ve tried any of those things, of course.”

Tim winked, and Sasha levelled a stare at him that said she knew that he certainly had.

“There’s other things, too. Listen, you can hear it right now, he’s reading it in French.”

Sure enough, when Sasha turned her head to listen there was Jon’s crystal-clear, clipped voice rhythmically reciting long, winding sentences, faintly through the door. Sasha knew a little French from school, but this was beyond her: someone rambling on and on about being lost, something turning, over and over and over again, all spoken with the ease of someone talking in their first language.

“So?”

“ _So_ , he said to me just on Friday that he doesn’t speak French, and now here he is flawlessly rattling off great long streams of it.” Tim tilted his head, a hint of brotherly concern flickering across his face. “Jon won’t eat or sleep if he feels like he needs to find one of these, either. Like they’re more important than him not dropping down dead.”

Sasha nodded gravely, acknowledging the concern. She wasn’t sure that it was _spooky_ , though. The archivist was strange, but his strangeness was not without myriad potential explanations. Whatever Jonah Magnus had done or was doing, to train him into his current role - whatever it was he had as a threat over Jon, since only a fool could fail to notice how obviously Jon held his master in fear, how he always stood ramrod straight in his presence - had done a number on him, clearly, and she would not put it past Jon to merely forget a language and then spontaneously remember it. His mannerisms were odd in the extreme; he seemed both determined to speak to her but visibly unsure of how to do so, both shy and jaded. Tim and Sasha were happy enough in each other’s company, and Jon seemed awkwardly not-displeased to be around them both, but he only ever really relaxed with Martin, and even then, both men were far from sure of themselves. It just seemed that Martin had a higher tolerance for Jon’s oddness than anybody else, and Jon a greater capacity to be in Martin’s presence without the urge to flee. They had known each other the longest, according to Tim, but only by a little while. Something must have happened between during that time to bond over, because for all that Martin was big-hearted and steadfast and Sasha liked him, he was no more lacking in social issues than Jon. Oftentimes Martin seemed to withdraw into himself, skin frighteningly cold and eyes clouded, bringing a chill air about him that would have seemed more at rights on some empty moor or tall ship out at sea - perhaps even the kind of ship that Martin had mumbled something to her about having worked on. The mystery was intriguing; but still, Sasha was content to let them keep it within their confidence, for the time being. All that really mattered was that they were good for one another.

Thinking of which -

“Martin isn’t in there with him, is he?” she asked.

“No, Jon doesn’t let anyone else sit in and listen to those things. Martin’s up in the library on his own assignment for the day.”

Sasha raised her eyebrows; Tim shrugged.

“Something about reflections? He’s looking for cases of images twisted in ripples in water or blown glass manifesting into real life, I think.”

She gave an exaggerated shudder, for Tim’s benefit, to see him smile. Things that were _not quite right_ always seemed to get under his skin in an intense way, triggering… well, not fear, exactly, or not _just_ fear. Disquiet, nervous vigour. Something else she wished to ask after, but wouldn’t.

“I should probably check in on Martin, soon, actually,” Tim went on. “He’s been alone a while. What about you, what’s the boss set you today?”

Sasha lit up, holding her pile of notes tighter to her chest.

“Recurisons - spiral patterns, Fibonacci sequences, that kind of thing. There’s been a sudden spike in interest in them in the London area: people have been seeing them everywhere, staring at walls for days and drawing them all over, even in blood. The doctor I spoke to called it a mass hysteria, but I don’t think that’s quite right. The way everyone involved describes it, they seem to believe they were pulled inside the pattern by something actively malicious. It seems to be getting worse all over the city, too. It’s fascinating.”

Fascinating, and unsettling in the extreme too, but what kind of paranormal researcher would Sasha be if she deigned to admit that?

Tim’s mouth had fallen open in betrayal, hand pressed melodramatically to his heart.

“Scandal! Blatant favouritism from the head archivist, as usual. You’re delegated the harder and the more interesting tasks, and I get the endless encyclopaedia diving over faerie doors and ‘gateways’. I’m hurt, Sasha, I’m offended.”

Defensively, Sasha tensed up. She bit back the arguments that bubbled up automatically: yes, Jon had no need and as far as she could tell no reason to favour her, she _was_ the more qualified researcher of the two of them, and besides, she had a little mathematical education where Tim didn’t beyond what was legally necessary, but none of that mattered. If this was the moment that Tim finally decided that he wasn’t content working in a woman’s shadow, then so be it, and shouting at him would not persuade him otherwise.

But Tim’s demeanour had softened, genuine worry on his face.

“I’m sorry, Sash’, I’m only joking, I know it’s not like that. Are you alright?”

The stress in her frame evaporated all at once, and she looked down, concealing an expression of slight embarrassment. Of course not, no, Tim wouldn’t do that.

Most would, though.

“I’m fine,” she said quietly, her left hand travelling to the small of her back to tug habitually at the laces of her corset. Were they tightening by themselves somehow? She had fixed them as slack as would create the proper shape that morning, but between then and now she had been forced to loosen them several times. “I just need to see Jon so I can send off for another journal.”

They both paused, listening to the continuous stream of French, until Tim shrugged and spoke up.

“Don’t reckon he’s going to be done any time soon. I’ll pop up to Martin and see if I can drag him down here, if you care to wait him out.”

*

“… _the tunnels continue on in twisting infinity, and although I am outside of them for now I will never truly be free of them, for they are a part of me. Even as I write I know that somehow my feet continue to tread through them; even as they strap me down and drug me out of my will, I still walk them; even as I sleep, or die, I walk. Nor do I_ ** _wish_** _to be free anymore, if I ever did._ _I can no longer remember the sanity from which I am removed, and it is comforting that the labyrinth only lies and does not ask to be understood. Forgive me, Adèle, but I intend to fold myself willingly into the belly of the beast, and be consumed. It is twisting. It is hungry. It is twisting. It is hungry. It is twisting. It is lying._ ”

The last of the words left his lips, and along with it the last of the Eye’s power. Jon slumped back, suddenly drained, throat very dry after speaking for so long. Without looking, he unsteadily picked up a pen, dipped it in ink, blotted it, and began to write, muttering his notes to himself as he did so.

“As Mister Lorrain was born in 1734 it is highly unlikely that he is still alive in any conventional sense of the word, although the Hospital has no record of his death. This letter has been in the Institute’s possession for a number of years, I suspect since before my birth; clearly Mister Lorrain intended for it to be sent, but it was never addressed or sealed, and I’ll have to ask Mister Magnus how he obtained it. This certainly isn’t the only item in storage taken from Bedlam, and others might also prove relevant.

“Mister Lorrain encountered a manifestation of the Twisting Deceit - the Distortion, more specifically. The state of mind it found him in was one amenable to its torments, if also terrified of them; he seems to have accepted without hesitation the concept of its architecture also being its bones, although it’s hard to tell, his language is understandably a little confused. That being said, Mister Lorrain’s hand is remarkably steady throughout. I almost wonder if he dictated this to another person, but a clerk would have difficulty following him, I think.”

Jon pushed the statement away, hands trembling slightly. The candle on his desk had burned down hazardously low without his noticing, and he pinched it out - an unsteady open flame in an archive, dangerous, Mister Magnus wouldn’t be pleased.

The Spiral was getting bolder. This statement wasn’t new, but Jon could recognise the predation patterns outlined by Pierre Lorrain in dozens of newer statements, in reports and studies and word of mouth. To pick a victim interred in a lunatic asylum could be expected of the Spiral - already perceived as mad, already scared of being so - but the newer victims seemed to be drawn from all tracks of life, many of them never afraid of losing their wits before it had begun to target them. It was creating new fear to feed from, not merely cultivating that which was already present.

Jon knew that his assistants were noticing, too. They could hardly fail to: with the exception of fielding live statement-givers and more accounts of what people were, much to his annoyance, beginning to sincerely refer to as the _Millbank Wolfman_ , all they had been working on for the past week was It Is Not What It Is. Tim, Sasha, and Martin all had their own theories, ranging from a city-wide gas leak to an actual displacement of reality. He couldn’t let himself show any credence to their ideas, even when they were correct. The more they knew, the more danger they were in, especially under the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze.

They were… closer to him than he had anticipated, now. Obviously he couldn’t just abandon Martin and Sasha to the mercy of the Entities circling them, and Tim had decided quite bluntly before Jon’s very eyes that they would be friends, so it wasn’t as though he had had another option. But he wasn’t sure he understood. With Martin, Jon had saved him, and Martin had been thankful and caring in return, and that made sense. He had done nothing for Tim and Sasha except perhaps spoken politely to them - not even that, at first. And yet they constantly offered him affection that he hadn’t earned. Maybe they would want something from him later? But, much as Jon hated to Look at his assistants, he Knew instinctively that wasn’t true. The unfamiliar sensation of their attention still grated on him.

A knock came on the sturdy wood of his office door, making him jump.

“Yes?”

“Jon? Are you done?”

It was Martin’s voice. Jon rounded his desk and opened the door, stepping out blinking into the better-lit main portion of the archives; he was met with all three of them, Tim and Sasha poised over Martin’s research on visual distortions, Martin hovering awkwardly next to his door. He was wearing that tender smile of his, only for Jon, hidden from the others, and it silenced the question in Jon’s throat for a moment.

Time enough for Tim to lean up and frown at the dim space behind him.

“You shouldn’t be reading in light like that, boss, you’ll strain your eyes.”

He most assuredly would not; Jon could almost laugh at the idea of Mister Magnus allowing harm to come to his eyes.

“I only put the candle out a moment ago, Tim,” Jon retorted, utterly failing to soften his tone. Tim didn’t seem to mind, giving him an indulgent look, the kind a person might aim at a grouchy puppy snapping at them.

“We were just going to offer you some tea,” Martin cut, sheepish but resolute. “According to Tim you were speaking for quite a while.”

That sounded wonderful, actually. Jon found himself longing to sit around and drink tea with them, and stamped on that feeling. He had work to do.

“I have to mail these inquiries for Mister Magnus,” he said stiffly, glancing away so that he didn’t have to see Martin’s face fall. “Thank you, though.”

“Oh, I actually have to send off for a-” began Sasha, and Jon squirmed away from possibility that she was about to offer to spend time with him.

“I can take that too.” He held a demanding hand out for it, and after a moment’s hesitation was handed the letter. “I won’t be very long.”

“Afterwards, then.” Martin said gently; Jon nodded silently, heading for his heavy coat.

“We’ll get him next time,” Tim consoled Martin in a cheerful whisper, not quite quiet enough for Jon not to hear.

*

There was strange music in the air, the distant, discordant singing of something that might have been one voice with an awful echo, or many voices, or neither. Jon was helplessly angry with the awareness that most people would not Know as he did to tune it out, wouldn’t Hear how unnatural it was as clearly as he did. He hated wandering the streets, understanding that something was exerting its power over them, drawing out fear, unable to step in. It reminded him of those powerless childhood experiences that still haunted his nightmares.

The post office was both blissfully warm and mercifully empty; the hour was later than Jon had realised, and it must have been near closing. Luckily they were very used to him appearing at strange times.

At the desk, the usual young woman looked up from her newspaper, noticed Jon, and immediately glanced over to see if the telegram boy was around. He flushed and approached her desk for the penny post instead. Jon had spent a great portion of his younger years sent scurrying for the telegram on Mister Magnus’s behalf - less, now that he was old enough to be more use in other capacities, but still often enough.

As he crossed the shop floor, however, a sudden obstacle appeared before him, winding between his legs with a fond chirp, covering his black trousers with orange fur, and doing its best to send him sprawling. Jon’s short noise of shock transformed quickly into one of outrage as he recognised the _obstacle_ ’s very familiar curling tail-tip and delighted blink.

“You!”

The cat had disappeared around the same time that Magnus had begun to interview for new archival assistants, stopped hanging around the townhouse kitchens or the roof outside the servants’ attic rooms. Jon had tried to conceal how worried he was that Magnus had somehow gotten rid of it, but Martin had been distraught.

And yet it was, unharmed, unashamed, and noticeably fatter than it had been. The cat meowed up at him insolently and Jon, forgetting all pretense at dignity, bent down to grab it by the middle so that he could stare directly at its tiny, smug face.

“ _Here_? You’ve been here?! Do you know how upset Martin was when we couldn’t find you?”

It meowed plaintively. Jon Knew it was uncomfortable held up underneath its armpits and, predictably, caved to the demands of a small animal that was totally unconcerned with his irritation, tucking it more securely against his chest. He sighed as it began to purr and ignored how it crushed his letters.

“Wretched, incorrigible beast.”

The girl at the desk had her hand pressed over her mouth, but she was definitely laughing at him behind it. Jon huffed. He couldn’t really find it in him to care: the cat was alive, and very soft under his fingers, calming his nerves.

Too busy smiling at the contented orange cat in his arms, the girl completely ignored the letters he handed her.

“Is he yours?”

The usual denial rose to Jon’s tongue, but he swallowed it. Mister Magnus wasn’t there to overhear him, after all, and it was a bit late to pretend he didn’t know the creature.

“Sort of. He, um, eats mice for my employer - or he _used_ to.”

Jon glared disapprovingly down at the cat, who was still brazenly cuddling him.

“We- My friend was worried that he might have had an accident.”

“Just being spoiled here,” confirmed the girl, grinning. “I said he had to be a pet - look at the way he acts. We fed him, but I didn’t want to give him a name, since he probably already has one.”

Jon flushed in embarrassment; the cat had not, of course, for a long time, but Martin had made sure to rectify that soon after meeting it.

“Uh, ‘The Admiral’.”

Obviously the name had not been Jon’s choice. He had tried to object, but eventually was forced to concede to Martin that the cat did consider himself their commander.

She nodded, as though that was a perfectly sensible choice, and then focused boldly on Jon. They had met many times, but never exchanged more than a few words before.

“And you?” she asked.

Clearly she wasn’t afraid to test the boundaries of propriety - but then, there was no one watching them (Jon could always tell), Jon had just scolded and been _ignored by_ a cat in front of her, and though Mister Magnus had painstakingly drilled strict etiquette into him, Jon had never been very skilled at summoning the energy needed to obey those rules.

“Jonathan.” he said, attempting a pale imitation of Martin’s usual warm tone, and knowing that it probably came off stilted and odd from him. If that bothered her, she didn’t show it.

She had an easygoing air, a very plain black dress with a purple flower in the top button-hole, strands of frizzy hair escaping her formal, professional bun, and a faint Scouse accent. She wished it was permissible to wear much brighter colours to work, Jon Knew without meaning to, and slammed his connection to the Eye shut as best he could. He was curious, but whenever he tried to Know things about people he always seemed to come quickly to their fears, and he didn’t want that.

“Georgina,” she said warmly. “But call me Georgie.”

“Jon, then.”

Only Magnus ever really addressed him as Jonathan, anyway. God, how did people continue these conversations?

“I, um. I work for the Magnus Institute.”

“Yes, I know.”

He winced - of course. Fortunately she seemed unbothered, carrying on talking as she turned to sort the postage for his letters.

“Any good ghost stories recently, then? Or actually, any new details on that Millbank Wolfman? I hear it’s quite the menace. Maybe that’s what the Admiral took shelter in here from.”

Jon made a noise of faint disgust in his throat. Just his luck, to only ever be asked about the nonsense. And he was sure the Admiral had simply decided that it lived in the post office because they had started feeding him scraps. But Georgie was smirking as she turned back to him, wide skirt swishing.

“What? Don’t believe in ghosts?”

“Not really,” he answered, with the audible fatigue of someone who nonetheless spent much of his time discussing them. It wasn’t exactly a lie: so-called _ghosts_ were almost always some other sort of manifestation, and it was an imprecise term, not a word he liked. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t heard plenty about them that he’d believed.

“Shame, in your line of work. Thruppence, then, for the letters. And for your lovely cat.”

She scratched the Admiral gently under the chin before she held her hand out for the money, Jon doing his best not to lean away from the almost-contact, and Jon Knew at once that the cat loved her deeply.

“You’ll see him again,” he promised, not quite sure why he did. It sounded a little too much like he was saying _you’ll see me again_. “I’m sure he’ll find his way back here.”

Georgie seemed pleased.

“I’d like that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:  
> \- period-typical ableist attitudes to 'madness', including mentions of Bedlam Hospital. That warning also applies for much of the rest of the fic.
> 
> Did you know that the mathematical concept of fractals didn't exist when this fic is set? Also did you know: I hate math


	5. Incense

Jon was getting twitchy. Since the hiring of the new assistants he had been reluctant to take live statements, doing so only in the small hours when they wouldn’t be able to see what came over him. Two in almost a month _wasn’t enough_ , even with the compensation of more written statements, and he found himself waspish, faint, jagged at the edges. Martin tried anxiously to coax him to eat, and Jon had been forced to tamp down hard on the urge to snap that _food wasn’t what he was hungry for_. He slept even less restfully than usual, mollified sometimes by the weight of the Admiral at his feet or kneading on his chest - but he still guiltily shooed the cat away when he had the strength of resolve to do so, reluctant to let it close to him, especially at Mister Magnus’s townhouse, in the full knowledge that he had been ordered not to bother trying to care for any animals. An old order, yes, given to a much younger boy, but that was no reason to believe it wasn’t still in effect. Anyway, it was juvenile to need such comfort.

Which was why it was almost a relief when _Melanie King_ came storming down the stairs into the Archives of the Magnus Institute. _Almost_.

She dodged neatly around the receptionist who had been trying to slow her, compensating smoothly for a near-imperceptible limp, marched straight past the stunned archival assistants, and came face to face with Jon in the middle of the room, arms folded across her chest and jaw squared.

He knew who she was instantly, of course, and hated it. A younger version of the same face stared out enigmatically from posters and newspapers all over London, the same striking, almost luminous pale eyes, the same iconic plaits - though they were hanging over her shoulders at present, rather than looped at the sides of her head.

London’s most famous spirit medium was not someone that an individual in his professional field could fail to recognise.

Though they had never met before, Melanie met his glare with equal vigour. The type of person to run a public seance and the type of person neck-deep in academia were naturally at loggerheads, and without having to be told, both seemed aware precisely what the other thought of them.

“You’re not supposed to be down here,” sniped Jon flatly, at the same time as she demanded,

“Are you the head archivist?”

She narrowed her eyes, challenging him to answer first.

“Yes,” he admitted, sharp. It was hardly an accusation. “And?”

“You take statements on the supernatural?”

“Yes, but-”

She barged past him, into his office, without bothering to ask permission.

Out of the corner of his eyes Jon could see Sasha and Martin gaping open-mouthed at her back. But Melanie had a statement, he could almost taste it, and Jon had never once in his life managed to allow good sense to overcome curiosity. He sighed angrily, turned, and followed her inside. Both ignored the slam of the door as it swung shut behind him.

“Traditionally, you’re supposed to arrange an appointment, Miss King.”

Clearly they were long past that, but it was the principle of the thing. Melanie paused in looking around his cramped office and its jammed shelves and cabinets to glance back at him with sharp eyes.

“You know who I am, then?”

“Of course. I’ve seen the posters. And we’ve had more than one person come in to give a statement about their experiences at your sessions - your eyes rolling back, the lights flickering as their aunt in the great beyond ‘speaks’ through you.”

His tone dripped with disdain, which she met defensively.

“People like a show. Even if it is hammed up a bit, anyway, they’re genuine connections. Real investigations beyond the veil, just like what you do.”

He snorted. _The veil_.

“I assure you it is not the same.”

“Oh, no, you’re right, it’s not.” she sneered. “You don’t call on something whose responses can be measured, instead your oh-so prestigious ‘institute’ accepts the word of any rambling opium-addled lunatic and has its archivist note it down for posterity!”

“And yet _you’ve_ come to make a statement.” Jon shot back - and then, catching on a crucial element of the way she had marched into the Institute. “How did you know I was the archivist?”

People didn’t usually realise that he was anything more than Mister Magnus’s pet servant. She pushed a plait back over her shoulder, annoyed.

“What does it matter? A friend of mine described you, said you were younger than a person should think, tired-looking. It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

“Hm.”

Jon stepped past her and settled himself behind his desk, then took up his pen.

“What is it that you want to give your statement on the topic of?”

Still standing, she hesitated to think, ignoring the chair that statement-givers usually sank gratefully into.

“About… my encounters with war ghosts.”

Jon couldn’t help but sigh at the thought of the wasted time.

“Miss King, can I please emphasise that these interviews are intended as a starting point of research into real events or phenomena, so-”

Her expression twisted with fury, hands balling into fists.

“For God’s sake! It _is_ real, I’m so tired of people telling me that I’m hysterical or lying, or ignoring, or-”

Jon frowned. That was odd: surely the whole premise of a mystic such as Miss King relied on a vast network of friends or family around her prepared to believe, to support and prop up the lie, not to accuse her? What on earth had she been saying that her spiritualist colleagues were so keen to disprove?

She was red-faced, frustrated to the point of cross tears.

“-or refusing to believe me when I tell the truth about what happened to me to give me _this_!”

Before Jon could open his mouth to object - before he could make any move at all to stop her - Melanie reached down, boldly pulled up her skirts to her knees, shoved down her half-unbuttoned boot, and stomped her unstockinged leg up onto the chair.

“Look!”

Any incoherent noise of scandalised refusal died in Jon’s throat at the sight; not at her shamelessly bared leg, but at what was lodged inside it.

It was what he could only describe as a _Wound_ , garish and swollen and pulsing with visceral _fury_ that Jon could almost hear screaming itself hoarse in the tense silence of the room. It oozed with fresh blood - but not Melanie’s blood. The injury _itself_ was bleeding, leaking its rage into the world, staining the floor invisibly with the power of the Slaughter. There was something inside it, invasive and infected and vicious. The Wound _hated_ him. It wanted to hurt him, wanted to drive its host feral with pain and make _her_ hurt him, force her to lash out at everything and everyone around her.

“Good lord,” he whispered, unable to tear his eyes away, transfixed with horror. Unconsciously, Jon bent just a little closer to stare, and heard the rustle of expensive fabric as Melanie’s grip tightened on her dress.

“You… can see it?” she asked slowly, a new edge of uncertain vulnerability to her voice.

“What?” He glanced up, blinking. “Yes, of course I can see it.”

Jon drew back, and Melanie put her leg down and let her skirts fall back, hiding again the Wound and its throbbing violence. It seemed wrong that it could be concealed below so fragile a barrier. Frankly, he was amazed that she could walk at all, with what the Eye whispered was a barb of endless stabbing agony beneath her skin. All the proud defiance had faded out of her for the moment, and her unusually bright eyes shone wetly.

“Is that a _musket ball_?” he blurted.

“I think so.” she confirmed weakly, despite his incredulity. “But, I don’t understand, you’re… you’re the first other person to be able to see it."

Jon had no answer to that, no excuse. In all truth he was not so surprised to hear it. He had a special talent for Seeing things that were concealed to others, after all; he had been very extensively trained to do so. Admitting such, though, was not something he was accustomed to.

Melanie cleared her throat, trying to muster up her energy again over the shock of being actually believed.

“I thought I was losing my mind.”

 _You and most of London_ , whispered Jon’s internal voice, keen with stress. The Spiral lurked malignantly at the edge of all his thoughts, like a dark cloud, or an incoming migraine.

“Yes,” he said instead, assuming his air of professionalism as best he could. “Yes, it’s become rather a lot easier to feel as though you are, at present.”

Some of Melanie’s former defensive irritation leeched back into her system.

“Well, if you knew _phantom musket balls_ are real, of all things, then why wouldn’t you believe me?!”

“You were a child spiritualist,” Jon pointed out pettily. “Not exactly a well known source of reliable information. You’re still, actually, a child spiritualist, more or less.”

“I’m not a _child_ \- I’m young, but -”

“But, close enough.”

“Well, how old are you?!”

Jon came up short, huffed, and abruptly changed the subject.

(They were the same age. Not that it mattered.)

“Irrelevant. If you’re satisfied that I…” He trailed off, rubbing the growing headache at his temple and trying to contain some of his impatience. He was so hungry, and the _thing_ inside him was straining at its bounds at the prospect of an imminent feast. This girl, somehow, had been shot by the Slaughter, and it desperately wanted to Know why.

“Since we’ve established that I _do_ believe you, Miss King, would you care to give your statement now?”

She sat, restless hands smoothing out her dress to give them something to do, and nodded determinedly. Jon nodded back.

“Statement of Melanie King,” he began, quickly transcribing down the words as he did in his personal, nigh-incomprehensible shorthand. The suffocating, inescapable power of Beholding rose around them, bringing with it a pins-and-needles paranoid sensation of being Watched, as though their every thought was being pierced by a thousand eyes. “Regarding her encounters with war ghosts. Statement given third of February, 1849.”

He glanced up, his own eyes suddenly intense on hers, and compulsion thick and heavy as honey on his tongue.

“What happened?”

*

_I started performing seances when I was eleven. Just a bit of fun, really, at first; my father didn’t ever quite believe it, but he had friends who did, and he was fascinated by how they reacted. I just liked the attention. It was when those friends starting inviting_ **_their_ ** _friends, and offering to pay, that we realised what we could make of it. Papa was a journalist, and money could be… I mean, you’d never say we were poor, but his sisters never married, and after my mother passed he was supporting my aunts and me alone._

_They’re easy, the seances. The mind believes what it wants to believe. All that matters is the acting, making sure you have the ambience right: I was a serious girl, and I would just let my eyes go blank, make my voice all deep and raspy and my face slack, and say whatever came into my head. My aunts would make sure the lights flickered or sputtered out at the right times, or they would rap on the underside of the table, make other noises - I remember, they used to open a piano in the next room and rub on its strings sometimes, that was an odd sort of groaning. When we started to get popular they’d give me cues on a customer’s dead friends and relatives beforehand and I would improvise from there. Usually I’d just say something vague about the customer being loved, watch them look all impressed and weepy, and get a ‘donation’ from there._

_But that doesn’t mean I don’t have real power. Like I said, Papa never liked to acknowledge it, but he told me once that when I was very small that I… that my eyes are the way they are because when my mother was, when she - I don’t remember, but he says I watched, when my mother d-_

_It doesn’t matter. That isn’t what you asked. I only mean that there truly are things beyond our consciousness, that I know how to see, that most mediums can’t. The spirits aren’t how most people think of them, not ghostly voices or apparitions, or hands reaching out from some next world after death. They're more like… flowing energies or emotions._

_Fear, especially. It hangs around mourners and places of death like smoke. This place is all but glowing with it. Sometimes I use the candles and the spirit board to focus the Second Sight, but it’s really all just about the colour and the shape of the thing around the customer. I follow the lines of the terror and figure out what happened to the person they love, or what’s about to happen. Other people react to it, sense it somehow, but they never seem to see it: they just get scared._

_Occultists don’t pay for fragments of fear in the air, though. They pay for speaking to the dead._

_I, ah. I don’t know why I told you that? Normally I just… I mean, if I’m a medium then I’m a medium, right? It doesn’t matter what kind._

_I used to go wandering off to look for the energies, when I had time spare. Just to watch the colours at a distance. There was always the temptation to get closer, of course - but we’ve all heard the ghost stories, I didn’t want to accidentally invoke any kind of demon. And even though it’s mostly just sorts of pulsing lights, occasionally something would catch my eye that was… darker? Or perhaps brighter, or, more focused? Something more intense, more threatening, I don’t know how to explain it. Back then I didn’t have much of a reason to pursue it: we had built up a steady income from spiritual sessions, so there was no need to stray into peril. I still wanted to, though. My father used to say I have an investigative soul._

_Then Papa died. A little more than two years ago, now. My aunts and their gentlemen friends started to get more controlling, interested in doing more elaborate stunts - and I had never given any thought to the way they exaggerated for the seances, I still don’t much care, but there was_ **_that_ ** _and then there was outright counterfeiting. I didn’t want to be any part of it. So I left, moved out on my own and found a place in a lodging-house with another young lady. I was still doing the sessions, but I… suddenly there wasn’t a reason not to investigate the spirits properly, and I grew more reckless. A girl exploring alone, I know - but I had a knife, and a little knowledge of how to handle it._

 _I’d never paid much attention to hospitals before. They’re depressing, and honestly fairly boring, just the same spirits around all of them: the sickly yellow of disease, and the thick black of the dying or the dead. Papa died at home, but he was ill, had been for a long time and hadn't been_ _young even when I was born_ _, so we expected it. When he was near the end I could see the dread around him like a shroud. He was a good man, a loving man; he told me not to sit around and wait for his ghost, and I didn’t, but I still couldn’t stand to see others from sick people, either. So I avoided hospitals._

_Except, last November, I was walking near the old East India Docks and I passed the crumbling remains of one particular building that changed things. I didn’t know back then, but it had been a temporary military hospital for officers wounded in the fighting against Napoleon. I don’t think the structure was ever meant to last: the beams were half rotted away, and the whole thing sagged sadly, ready to collapse in on itself. It wasn’t something I would ever have given more than a glance._

_That day, I stopped in my tracks as a scream came from somewhere within it. A howl, you could say. It sounded_ **_furious_ ** _._

 _Some madman, probably, I would have thought. Except, I could_ **_see_ ** _it, like a bloody streak painted through the night sky, and there was this horrible smell in the air, too. Iron and something acrid I didn’t recognise then, charcoal and saltpeter and a little sulphur. Gunpowder._

_I was - I’m not ashamed to admit it, I was scared. But I didn’t even consider not looking inside. The hospital… well, it was unsettling, but it was no more so than any dark old building, and it wasn’t a site my spiritualist friends had ever whispered about being an area of particular power. I thought that I could feel the temperature falling around me, but I dismissed that as likely that I was just shaking in fear and trying to excuse my own cowardice by the cold. When something began to move in the shadows - there must have been rats all over that place, was all, it was filthy. It didn’t look as though anybody had set foot inside in fifty years. Besides, I couldn’t hear footsteps._

_Turns out there weren't any footsteps because the_ **_thing_ ** _that came out of the ceiling behind me levitated off the ground. A woman, I think, or something that was once a woman, all grey and rotted. Her face was twisted up in hatred and agony, and she held a great surgeon’s carving knife, a long, wicked thing meant for slicing flesh away from a bone to be amputated. The fear around her as she swung it down at me was crimson._

_I just managed to dodge - I think I jolted back quite on instinct, and fell out of the way, the pathetic little pocket-knife in my hand less than useless while I lay stricken, staring up at the ghost and unable to move from the stained floorboards._

_She - it, rather - grabbed at my neck like it was reaching for a cravat, and dragged me off my feet. Somehow I was sure that it wasn’t seeing_ **_me_** _: its eyes were unfocused, blind with rage. Its hands slipped through me like steam, but they were still unnaturally strong, all wrong and bony. I can still feel them on me now._

_When I tried pathetically to kick out it screamed again, and the world turned red. I felt the room shift around me, and I heard the deafening thud and crack as it flung me across the room, into a wall, but I didn’t see any of it. All I saw was red._

_By the time my head stopped spinning enough for me to regain vision, the creature was gone. Nothing more than a smear of my blood far too high on the wall I’d slumped against could prove what had happened. I began by searching for information from other spirit mediums, but at their reactions I began to notice that… that we all seemed to revere the same places, to practice the same sorts of summongs. There’s no end to common folk stories and whispers of apparitions, but there’s surprisingly few that paying customers really expect to manifest, and we all seem determined to play into those expectations. Even those that really, no-qualms believe in the spirits don’t seem to be aware that they’re doing it. I used to assume it was because that methodology was the true path, the one that worked, but I don’t believe that anymore. I think it’s because it’s safe. It's a way to protect practitioners from what’s actually out there._

_I won’t bore you with the details of how I found the place. A hundred dead-ends, a thousand instances of poking my head where it wasn’t wanted. First I tried abandoned buildings like that at the docks, then real hospitals, active military ones if I could sneak inside._

_That’s what I thought Saint Elena’s was, at first. Do you know Saint Elena? I didn’t. She's not a saint people like to talk about much: she was canonised for killing thousands of her people’s enemies; setting them alight, burying them alive, massacring them at banquets._

_The whole place was drenched in red, the fear was painted into the brickwork like lime-wash. It felt angry even to step inside, but it all looked so real, so bustling. People were ignoring the terror that clung thickly to them and going about their business inside, and they seemed content to ignore me too. I wandered unhindered through the wards until I was lost inside, watching_ _the injured and the staff, who were all different types of soldiers._ _I didn’t know enough about military uniforms to realise immediately that these were all entirely distinct from each other: different regiments, different divisions, different eras, different countries. And some of the injured seemed as though they should never have been able to move. I had my bonnet on, my head angled down, but out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing men far too drenched in blood to be standing, and then, as I got further in, men with their limbs half-severed, their jaws hanging off, with awful, gaping holes in their torsos._

_I should have turned back. But I couldn’t. I was obsessed with finding anything at all to assure me that I hadn’t been merely seeing figments of my imagination, that I was right to be afraid of the red ghosts._

_And I was too deep inside by then, by the time I realised that I was the only_ **_person_ ** _in that hospital still truly alive. My stiff limbs and my heart beginning to race seemed to draw some raised eyebrows and challenging looks, so I tried my best to stay calm and to meet glare with glare._

_When my hand closed around the handle of my newly-sharpened blade, the blood began to boil, and-_

_It took only a split second, but I saw the change come over them. Anything that was pretending to be human fell away from their eyes, and all that was left was carnage, and they attacked. Every soul in that building began at once to fight: not just to fight me, nor just the other soldiers, but themselves, even, ripping and rending and tearing. Injury was no impediment. Even dying didn’t stop them. Those that lost their form in the mindless violence seemed to… fuse, somehow, into some huge, vengeful mass of dead flesh and weaponry._

_I have been so angry my entire life. I never knew it, but I was, the violence coiled up in a secret place inside of me and ready to strike. It’s as though I’ve always been fighting, elbowing and clawing at the world around me to demand that it make a space for me, and I only realised it at that moment._

_I genuinely don’t know how I got out. Even if I did, I don’t think I could describe it to you. Blood and bones and fire and shining blades and guns and cannons. I know that I killed my way free, and they left my dress and my knife covered in viscera, gave me superficial cuts and bruises all over my body._

_And_ **_that_** _. I heard the musket go off so clearly; it hit me just as I escaped, as I fell over the boundary of the hospital into the sane world again, the real world. I was… I suppose I made quite the sight, shrieking bloody murder and waving my knife and clawing at my leg, but the trench-dirt and drying gore all over me was enough that I wasn’t recognised, thank god. Somebody summoned a doctor, and by the time I quieted enough to let him close he had already decided that I had lost my wits. He examined the leg for only a moment before he told me that I hadn’t been shot, I was merely reacting hysterically to a particularly severe muscle cramp. Then he said if I kept on screaming oaths at him he would call for a constable._

_He couldn’t see it. No one can see it. No one can feel what I feel, the wound open and raw, the metal trapped inside._

_I had a seance planned for the next day, but I missed it, too caught up in my roiling wrath to think. At first I desperately wanted not to go home; I was terrified that if I did I would infect my room and my companion with the anger. She’s a good friend, dear to me, not someone who deserves any of this. But eventually the thought of her worrying for me drove me back to our lodgings, and instead… seeing her soothed me._

_I’ve spent the weeks since quietly trying to hold down the rage, to recuperate and continue on with my spiritual sessions to bolster my funds. I must have sought out almost every doctor and alienist and witch in the heart of the city by now - every one I can afford - but none of them have given me any answers. None of them could see it._

_And then I came here, and you could._

_I’m still angry. And it’s still_ **_inside me_ ** _._

*

The compulsion around them faded, and Melanie trailed off, shoulders slumping, eyes falling to the floor. Jon’s pen scratched rapidly across the page as he copied out the last few words.

She seemed at a loss, casting about futilely for something to fill the void of silence that had filled the room in the sudden absence of her voice.

Jon noticed the moment her gaze fell on the sixteenth-century portrait of the Eye of Providence that Mister Magnus had rather pointedly given him to adorn his office, and which hung high on the wall behind his desk.

“That’s creepy.”

“Thank you.”

He ran his eyes over the statement again, stalling for a moment. It was the Slaughter that haunted her, of course, but its interaction with the mark of Beholding she had apparently gained in early childhood was certainly fascinating. Murderous, menacing, but fascinating too.

Whatever the musket-ball was doing inside her, it needed to be removed as soon as possible.

For the first time in far too long, Jon felt satiated, truly solid and whole for having fed the Ceaseless Watcher. He swallowed hard and spread out his papers to allow the ink to dry.

“I don’t know that there’s much the Institute could do by means of further research, Miss King,” he said haltingly, ignoring the buzzing impulse in his throat to tell her to cut the wound away like rot. He wasn’t supposed to tell them. He wasn’t supposed to interfere. It had been so much easier to do so before he had rescued Martin.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, ‘Saint Elena’s Military Hospital’ is not a real location, and there aren’t any other known accounts of such a manifestation. What you’re describing by the East India Docks… I suppose somebody could be sent down to investigate, but if a number of physicians and, uh, psychic practitioners, have pronounced you hale and healthy then I think that-”

“Are you serious?!” Melanie yelled, and he cringed away from it. She was definitely loud enough to be heard with perfect clarity from outside his office. “After you’ve seen it, you _still_ don’t-!”

“It’s not that I don’t believe you-” Jon cut, failing to adopt a neutral tone. “-just that I believe there is little we can actually do to confirm your story.”

Melanie stood abruptly, the chair shrieking back across the floorboards.

“Fantastic,” she spat, visibly seething. “I should have known that this was a complete waste of my time, I should never have listened to G-”

“You’re welcome to-”

“No. No, thank you _so much_ , I’ll handle it myself from here.”

She turned, fuming, to leave.

“Miss King,” Jon said quietly, his guilty conscience overwhelming the satisfaction of taking a statement, poking holes in his sense of duty to Mister Magnus. Melanie hesitated. “I- I would advise being very, very careful about… handling your temper, at present. About the urge toward violence.”

“If I feel an _urge toward violence_ then it’s with good reason,” Melanie snarled, yanked open the door, and marched out.

Jon waited for it to slam behind her to let loose the breath he had been holding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- canon-typical Slaughter content  
> \- supernatural violence, gore  
> \- supernatural infected wound  
> \- mention of parental death
> 
> (Melanie does not encounter Indian war ghosts because the British Empire was actively involved in brutal colonial wars and oppression in India during this period of time, and that would be pretty gross of me to exploit for a horror fic.)
> 
> This fic will contain a few full statements! I hope they're not too annoying.
> 
> Here's Melanie! All women's hairstyles in this period were dumb, don't @ me. What's the knife for? It's a secret tool that will help us later.


	6. Cascade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, like Melanie, I have a leg injury. Unlike Melanie's, it is very stupid, but it is also extremely painful and I am on a fairly brutal course of antibiotics and feel Pretty Bad and maybe not great at focusing at the moment. Chapters should continue to be posted every three days or so, but if I have a bit of a break it'll be recovering from that, and then I'll restart afterwards :)

Perhaps merely incensed by his abrupt meeting with Melanie King, perhaps finally beginning the nervous breakdown that Sasha predicted would strike him within at least a year, Jon had regained a strange and fervent vigour, and work in the archives had taken on a slightly manic quality.

Tim had been assigned to an ever-mounting stack of reports on the so-called _Millbank Wolfman_ , which Jon had begun openly pronouncing _hot air_ and _gibberish_ and throwing toward him without a second glance. In addition to quite accidentally becoming an expert on all forms of lycanthropy, Tim was forced to dedicate himself to organising increasingly precarious towers of papers and tomes across his desk, behind which his presence could only be identified by his frustrated groans.

Jon, meanwhile, had taken on responsibility for resorting and reviewing absolutely every statement - new and old - on the topic of doubting one’s sanity, in addition to his usual duties for Mister Magnus and his new obligation managing his assistants. To prevent (or, more likely, delay) his death from exhaustion, Martin had been drafted into these efforts, and most days disappeared into the library for long hours at a time. Sasha’s work had eventually become encompassed within it too, of course, and she had spent the past week carefully mapping out the location and dates of verifiably supernatural tales of madness. The chart this had produced made no sense at all - not when looked at directly, anyway. Seen in a mirror, or in her mind’s eye, the map began to form a dizzying geometric pattern, impossible and yet extant.

When she brought this to Jon’s attention, he had done as he so often did: stared in fascination for a brief, sincere moment, then seemed to remember himself, glanced shiftily over to her, and immediately denied any possibility of its veracity. Sasha hadn’t questioned this habit of his at first. He was merely a sceptic, she had presumed, and as someone far more well-versed in the usual workings of the paranormal than her he was better-qualified to dismiss what seemed to him unlikely. Either that or he was an ass, the type to dislike being challenged or disregard his subordinates’ contributions. Sasha didn’t believe either of those possibilities anymore, but she had no theories as of yet that fully explained his behaviour. For a man who insisted that he thought her map and her research on recursive sequences was not credible, Jon certainly pored over it enough with her.

Sasha had her facts straight. She knew that _something_ extraordinary was gaining in power or intensity. She knew that the thought of it seemed to put Jon in a state of enormous agitation. She had made sure to overhear enough of his work to know that it could be very dangerous. For now, she had decided, she would allow him to keep his secrets. It seemed cruel to try and interrogate him in such a state of heightened stress, especially after he had been so reinvigorated by what had sounded to be almost a screaming match with the spirit medium. Sasha made no attempt to raise her own deep, stomach-churning worries with any of her colleagues, for the same reason. No, that was her own business, best to stay quiet about it. That was what gentlemen preferred in women, wasn’t it? Peace and quiet? Her cousin’s husband Charles - probably she should call him her cousin, too, but she couldn’t stand to - had certainly said so.

“Here,” Jon was muttering to himself beneath his breath, as he emerged from the depths of the shelving system, eyes narrowed at the tiny print of the folder he was carrying. “Complaint of an artists’ model of dizzy spells and migraines after sitting for a sculptor she refers to only as ‘Gabriel’, passed to the Institute because - what on earth is that meant to say - passed to the Magnus Institute because of her description of a fellow muse… ‘lapsing’ into clay? ‘Laughing’ into clay? Misspelled, perhaps.”

“Hello, Jon,” Sasha said, gently, as he hadn’t looked up yet since entering the room, and she was fairly certain he would need a reminder of her presence. Sure enough, he blinked in surprise, trailing off as though he hadn’t realised he had been speaking aloud.

“Oh - good morning, Sasha.”

“Evening,” she corrected mildly.

“That can’t be right.”

She looked pointedly up to the grandfather clock in the corner of the office: just gone five o’clock, she had heard the chime. Jon scowled at it as though it had personally offended him, and mumbled something dark about having to be significantly more careful in calibrating clocks recently. That was true, actually, much as Sasha didn’t doubt that Jon would lost track of time under normal circumstances; she seemed to be constantly winding the clocks at home, and they still fell out of synchronisation, no matter anyone’s efforts. But it was definitely evening. She had heard the footsteps and shuffling above her of the vast majority of Magnus’s other employees retiring for the day.

Jon craned his neck to see into the mess of papers that obscured Tim’s desk.

“Did Tim go somewhere?”

“Home, I should think, Jon.”

Despite what she might wish, Sasha made no effort to suggest that Jon ought to do the same - he would not tolerate questions on the topic of his working hours, bizarre as they clearly were, always obfuscating with excuses about some sort of debt.

“And Martin with him?”

She closed her book to think, one finger marking the page.

“I don’t know. I saw Martin this morning, maybe, but I wasn’t entirely sure…”

Slowly but surely, they were moving toward spring and the temperature was rising, and Sasha hadn’t expected there to be quite so much mist around the entrance to the archives that morning. She had wrapped her shawl tight around herself, and hadn’t really been paying attention as she thought she noticed Martin’s tall shape stepping past her, blurred at the edges.

Jon frowned for a moment and then blanched, turning to dart upstairs. Sasha reopened her book.

When he reappeared a few minutes later, it was herding and apparently berating Martin, Jon’s thin fingers fussing about the shoulders of Martin’s over-large and fraying black overcoat.

“-I was busy,” came Martin’s voice, lifted with sheepishness. “I didn’t realise how long I’d been alone - it’s easy to get lost among the books, Jon, you know that.”

“Bring them down here then, I’ve said before that it’s not a problem-!”

“Is everything alright?” Sasha asked, replacing her book on her small stack; she had decided she had had enough of maze myths for the day.

“Yes,” Martin said, too quickly, turning red. “I’m quite fine, j-just feeling a little ill, is all. Jon was worried that there was no one to check up on me.”

Either at Martin’s claim to be _fine_ , or at the accusation that he had feelings, Jon scoffed. Both of them looked exhausted: Martin was considerably more pale than usual, and Jon had dark, bruised rings beneath his eyes.

“Why don’t you escort him home, Jon?” Sasha suggested, trying for two birds with one stone. “That way you don’t have to fret.”

 _And perhaps you’ll manage to spend one day working only during reasonable hours, too_ , she thought, though she supposed Jon probably didn’t relax much under Mister Magnus’s roof. Usually she would expect Jon to argue - but it seemed that he was too tired to resist the pressure of Martin’s expectantly raised brows, and he conceded with only a token grumble. The sharp lines of his face softened considerably at the smile Martin gave him for it.

Sasha was not customarily the type of person to linger unhealthily at the Institute, not like their archivist, and so all it took was her gathering up her notebooks in her arms like she also intended to leave soon for Jon and Martin to walk out into the night without too many questions. She breathed a slight sigh of relief: all day she had held herself together by sheer force of will alone, and she didn’t know if she still had the strength not to cry if anyone had asked why it was she seemed so reluctant to go home.

 _It’s all well and good, indulging a young lady’s flights of fancy_ , Charles had said over dinner - the cousin’s husband, not really her family, no matter how sure he seemed that he was family enough to have authority over her. It had not come out of nowhere, but she had been ignoring or dismissing the evidence for long enough that the jolt back to dreadful reality had felt sharp, jarring. _But I received a letter of inquiry from your parents today, and I find I must agree with them this has all gone on quite long enough, Alexandra. How is it that you expect to settle down if you coop yourself up all day in dusty libraries, and with strange men, no less? You must see that it’s not proper._

 _You must simply_ **_stop moving_ **, Sasha had heard a rumbling voice order her, ringing in the dining room with a hiss, as though her ears were full of shifting sand. That night she had no sleep, lying instead with her hands folded over her belly and her breath coming shallowly, with difficulty, as though some great, invisibly beast was laying its weight on her chest.

Disquieted, she smoothed down her hair over her ears and took as deep a gulp of air as she could manage, attempting to push the boning of her corset away from her ribs for a moment. It didn’t budge. _No matter_ , Sasha told herself, ignoring the anxiety that gnawed at her bones at that, and let the dress remain in place - far too stiff in place, considering the thousand times she had eased the laces since first dressing that morning. _No matter_.

She would simply work through the night. It was all too clear that Jon had done so before, and it was likely safer than waiting until the small hours to travel through London alone; if totally necessary she was certain that she could find somewhere in this deceptively large building to sleep, anyway.

For hours it was relatively easy, and then sitting for so long in the stiff upright position her dress demanded began to ache, and Sasha stood awkwardly to relieve her back.

If she couldn’t focus then she would simply use this time to find more resources, she decided, and tried in vain not to allow her mind to wander. Sasha wasn’t some medieval pawn, she could hardly be expected to be given away to a business partner of her father’s, but her family would want her to _meet someone_ , soon, to be idle and demure and innocent, and permit suitable young men - not like Martin, generous and self-effacing; not like Tim, all sincerity beneath teasing words; not at all like Jon, but then, who else was like Jon? - to kiss her hand and trap her in a life of embroidery and children and the tastefully-wallpapered interior walls of a well-kept house, on and on forever. The thought of the inevitability of it all made her sick with panic.

Sasha turned distractedly into a dim corridor that she had never seen before, a narrow passage with an odd, earthy smell. Her feet were carrying her toward it seemingly without her input. She had thought to go into the archives proper, to dig out anything more on the natural formation of maze-patterns, but she would be lying if she said that she had not been curious at the opportunity to explore more of her odd workplace. Now, unobserved - as unobserved as a person could truly feel in this place - was as good a time as any, she supposed, reaching out to trace the cool walls as she continued to walk steadily forward. They were so cold that they felt a little wet to the touch - or, perhaps they really were damp? Something with the texture of thin mud stuck to her fingers when she rubbed them together, but she didn’t stop moving.

She didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop.

Why couldn’t she stop?

When Sasha returned her hand to the wall, she found that the passage was no longer wide enough for her to fully extend her arm. Not a corridor, not anymore. Beneath her feet the floor began to tip down into the earth: a tunnel, then. After a few more steps - constant steps, relaxed, like she was sleep-walking, no matter how her mind raced and she trembled - she could stretch her hand no further than a foot from her shoulder.

Still, helplessly, Sasha continued to walk. Her skirt was going to be ruined. She could hear it scraping against both walls, even if it was now too dark in the tapering space to see, could hear the fabric catch and rip, her white petticoats crushed and stained by mud. All her clothes would be ruined. Tears of confused terror filled her eyes as she gasped rapidly at what little air her ever-tightening dress would allow her - but still she pressed on.

The ground was lumpy and pitted now, sending her stumbling every few steps, forcing her to push down a noise of pain at the sensation of her corset cinching, vicious and vice-like, around her waist. The ceiling was strangely close above her head, barely braced up, like a unsound mine-shaft; Sasha had to duck beneath it in order to keep moving. She almost lost her footing as she did, on what seemed to have suddenly become the unpredictable steps of a servants’ staircase, narrow enough to force her to contort her body to strange angles as she trod steadily down, into the deep. Was that _earth_ , around her? It couldn’t be stone. It crumbled at her touch, and the very air she struggled for in her fear was suffused with it, filling her up from the inside with loose soil.

She was trapped. Behind her, the walls seemed to press impossibly closer than those on either side: she could not go back, not escape, could not get _up_ or even stand immobile, only move further into the crushing choke. The knowledge of it was like freezing water thrown over her.

The sensation of the world closing in around her was _familiar_.

Her ankle turned on the uneven surface and she tripped into the dirt with not even enough air left to scream, tumbling down further than should have been possible; and even as she fell, a terrifying, deafening rumble filled her ears as the pit caved in around her.

Sasha fell, and the Buried swallowed her whole.

*

Jon woke up in his bedroom, alone, choking on dirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- misogyny, mostly around being pressured out of work and into marriage  
> \- canon-typical Buried content, including:  
> \- claustrophobia  
> \- choking  
> \- restricted breathing


	7. Katabasis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still injured but pushing through, thanks to everyone for the support. Merry Christmas by the way!
> 
> (The previous fic took place in late 1848, and this takes place in early 1849, which means Christmas happened in the mean time. And I do actually have Christmas headcanons, even if they are boring ones! Jon only ever really celebrated it in the workhouse, which basically consisted of an extra portion of boiled beef (yay?) and a church service about how it's a sin to be poor, but, you know, extra food is extra food and church means not working and getting to hear stories! Magnus appears to celebrate Christmas, enough for respectability, but really he only worships Beholding and neither he nor even young Jon would want to 'spend quality time together', that would just be stressful. Jon is currently one of the people in Victorian London least aware of Christianity; he has said the words "Jesus who?" in public, while sleep deprived. Martin was still a little out of it from the Lonely in Christmas 1848, but he bought Jon an orange. Jon got flustered and bought him a scarf in return. Tim teased the local butcher's son _and_ a scullery maid into kissing him under the mistletoe. Melanie got drunk. Sasha had a tense but diplomatic formal dinner with her family. Georgie also got drunk.)

Jon arrived at the Institute earlier than he ever had before, that morning - a hard record to beat, but he had managed it. The world around him had seemed to move like treacle, sleepy and oblivious to Jon’s frantic pace as he sprinted through London at perhaps four in the morning, frustrating unwillingly to bend to his panic. He scurried in and out of the archives, haphazardly tossing the information he needed into a chaotic pile on the floor. It made sense to him, that was all that mattered, even if the knowledge of how long it would take to replace the statements in their proper order and the indignant wrath it would provoke from Mister Magnus if he saw had white-hot anxiety curling in the pit of Jon’s stomach.

He could fix it. He could save her. He _had_ to save her, it was his fault.

Jon’s hands were weak, the edges of his vision unclear with fear and lightheadedness, but he ignored it and pushed on. Negligent beyond words, inexcusable, to leave her here alone at a time like this. How could he?

Jon had been so concerned with Martin, so deeply alarmed at the Lonely still taking the first opportunity to lap curiously around his friend, that he had been utterly deficient in his duty to another of his assistants, one he had known from the start to be standing on the very precipice of the Forever Deep. He had failed in the balancing act between satisfying his master, feeding his patron, and shielding his friends, and it was Sasha that had fallen from the knife’s edge. Were they his friends, really? He didn’t know how to tell. Moreover, would they still wish to be, when they saw the truth of things?

Jon mustered himself, shook himself out of pathetic self-pity and blinked furiously at the few tears threatening the corners of his eyes. There was no point in that, no time for it. The only thing worth doing was scouring through all he knew - and all he Knew, all the Eye could tell him - to find a way to reach her and get back without losing himself. Simple in theory, near impossible in practice. He had been inside domains of other Powers before, of course, but it had been Magnus and his delicate lattice of favours-owed and blackmail that had pulled him free of most of them; and he had rescued Martin, he _had_ , but then, a fear of isolation could be rather simplistically resolved. Another person’s mere presence wouldn’t be enough to break the Buried’s hold. What was the safe opposite of the Too Close? A fascinating intellectual exercise, he thought, a touch hysterical, under any other circumstances. Here and now, an awful reality.

He would save Sasha or they would both disappear into the crush, always suffocating, never allowed the escape of dying. And his debt to Mister Magnus would go unpaid, forced onto the shoulders of someone else; Martin or Tim, maybe, or some other orphan dredged up from circumstances terrible enough to gratefully sign their life off to Beholding. _Be quiet_ , he snapped at himself, trembling fingers ripping pages from books to join the debris scattered across the floorboards.What use were treacherous thoughts like that, now or ever? He was Magnus’s _heir_ , whatever that meant, inheritor of a role for the Watcher. If his assistants were to aid him in playing that role, the least he could do to pay them back was to protect them from the horrors _his_ archives invited toward them.

By the time other employees began to filter into the Institute, Jon was lost in the thoughtless work of preparing his rite, mind blank and trepidation merely a constant undercurrent to his actions. Realising he was no longer alone was a rude awakening; he jolted at the sound of a cautious voice asking,

“Jon?”

At the foot of the stairs were Tim and Martin, paused halfway through pulling off their outer winter layers to stare at him, kneeling in the middle of the archives floor, and the disarray that surrounded him. Jon realised suddenly that he had no idea what to say to them, hadn’t even considered that he would have to explain himself; his mouth moved without sound as he gazed frozenly back. After a long moment of staring, Martin seemed to decide that this was madness he needed to witness in full illumination, and hesitantly pulled the chain of the gas lamp. Too bright immediately: Jon’s head throbbed at the startling interruption, at the light, at the gaudy embroidered birds on Tim’s satin waistcoat - _only the front_ , whispered the Eye, overactive and roaringly loud in Jon’s mind; he Knew Tim had only been able to afford the fabric because it had a tear he’d painstakingly sewn up, the twist of the stitches still half-visible by the third button, _shut up_.

Jon’s preparations had spread slowly from his own office to all the other desks, needing the space, and he was sat with the papers and fragments he needed spread all around him on every available surface and patch of bare floor in a great circle of words and knowledge and terror - chaos, to the outside observer, but thrumming with power to someone who knew how to See it. He could feel Tim and Martin’s eyes running over it all, anticipated the questions that were rising in their throats.

But as he opened his mouth to try and answer some, he could also feel the sudden, oppressive weight of the Watcher’s gaze that marked his master coming close. The blood drained from his face in a reeling rush of dizzy fear.

The other two clearly noticed his expression.

“What’s wrong?” asked Martin.

“M-Magnus,” croaked Jon, eyes flicking up to the ceiling, tracing his master’s steps above them as he approached the staircase down to the basement. “I can’t - I couldn’t -”

He hadn’t come to meet Magnus in his office that morning, as he otherwise always did, not able to bear the thought of being Looked At with his thoughts so full of guilt and fright. Cowardly, and he hated himself for it, but this was more important. The thought that Mister Magnus might try to stop him from helping Sasha was too terrible to bear.

Tim and Martin exchanged a quick glance, and then Tim came to some internal resolution and began to move, throwing his coat and scarf over a chair, nudging Martin toward Jon with an elbow, and grabbing up a handful of papers from the mess. Heedless of the fact that most of them were upside-down and in Jon’s shorthand, not anything that he could read, he spread them out before him as though to examine them.

“Get him into the office and out of the way,” Tim urged to Martin above Jon’s head, trying his best to look natural hunched over the clutter.

Martin caught on faster than Jon, and gently pulled him up to his feet.

“Come on,” he said, firm in that way he only ever was when he thought there was some simple solution to be found. “We’ll handle it, you just hide.”

 _There’s no hiding from the relentless gaze of the Eye_ , Jon could have told them, if he could form the words. Instead he let Martin’s warm hand on his back guide him into the small, familiar space of his office and click the door shut behind him. There were statements in here that could serve his purpose too, actually - but Jon couldn’t move to grab them. He stilled the moment that Magnus crossed the threshold, Tim and Martin’s faint whispers of _what do you reckon these mean_ and _no clue, I bet J_ … falling silent immediately.

“Can we help you, sir?” Tim greeted, after a pregnant quiet, all fake nonchalance.

Through the door, Jon could sense Magnus’s scathing gaze as it swept over the state of the archives. He would certainly punish Jon for this. That was alright: Jon could endure whatever discipline Magnus could devise, so long as he could get Sasha out first. Any pain now would be no less than he deserved for allowing her to be dragged into the earth.

“We thought it might be valuable to be able to see everything we’ve been working on all at once,” Tim was saying, cloyingly cheery. “That way it might make a little more sense.”

“I See.” came Mister Magnus’s voice, low and dangerous and crisp despite the closed door. Jon heard him step closer, and a soft movement in response that was Martin putting himself bodily between his employer and the door to Jon’s office, a silent second as Magnus examined this apparent defiance with one arched brow. 

“Where is the archivist? He missed an appointment, this morning.”

“I can’t say I’m entirely sure, sir,” Tim lied, with astonishing ease, straight to the face of an embodiment of truths revealed. “Occupied, I think. If you’d like we could leave him a message?”

The contempt in Magnus’s tone was palpable, but he made no further move toward where he must Know his apprentice was concealed - after all, Jon was standing beneath the line of sight of the illustrated Eye of Providence.

“Jonathan is to come to my office at the first possible opportunity,” he ordered sharply. “To discuss a matter of utmost importance. Failure to do so will be considered an issue and will be _addressed_.”

Shudders ran down Jon’s spine, but he didn’t cave to the instinct to reveal himself and beg forgiveness; the assistants gave some vague noises of assent, and after a moment he heard footsteps up the steps again.

“That man gives me the creeps,” Tim said faintly, losing the friendliness, and startling a nervous laugh out of Martin.

Jon took a deep breath, and pushed out of his office with his arms full of the last few statements and his face set hard. These would be enough, he was fairly sure - they would have to be.

“I need you to read these,” he told the assistants, not making eye contact and not allowing time for their questions as he took his place again in the centre of the array, quickly sweeping away those that had been disturbed and switching out those that would work more effectively. “I’m so sorry.”

“Jon, what’s going on?”

He couldn’t respond.

“Please, I need you to read these to me, aloud, while I go-”

“Go where?”

He didn’t have any explanation that they would believe.

“What’s that going to do? Why do you need us to read them?”

Jon noticed, as though from a distance, that he was shaking really quite badly.

“Jon,” said Martin uneasily, apparently noticing for the first time the one conspicuously empty desk, the research she had left on it undisturbed by Jon’s frantic activity. “…Where’s Sasha?”

She was somewhere the Eye couldn’t see her. Somewhere outside of creation.

Jon only shook his head.

“She’s… not here, is she?” Tim pressed, a spark of outrage igniting alongside confusion and concern. “ _This_ has something to do with her. What happened?”

“She was here when we left last night, I thought she was about to - did she not go home? Could she be there?”

“Sasha isn’t at home,” Jon forced himself to say. “She isn’t anywhere. And she can’t get out of it.”

There was a streak of anger in Tim’s eyes, and Jon could see his mouth moving to form the word _dead?_ before he could even begin to say it. He shook his head again.

“Not dead, only trapped. I can - I-I think I have a way to…”

“To free her, too?” asked Martin, with fragile hope. Jon had done the same for him, after all. But he didn’t quite dare to say _yes_.

There was a moment of silence as Tim glanced mistrustfully around them. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Jon; just that he hated with a burning passion to be proved right, to know without any ambiguity that he had fallen into a deeper pit of unnatural secrets than he had intended. And he hated, too, that his fear for Sasha would force him to accept those secrets. After a second he huffed a terse laugh.

“I _knew_ there was something spooky about these things.” With an oath whispered under his breath, he braced himself. “For Sasha, right?”

Jon nodded.

“Lead on, then, boss.”

He directed each of them to piles of papers in the order he had set out within his mind, gathering up his own in his arms, and drew out a pocket watch Mister Magnus had given him from his waistcoat. It was inscribed with an open, staring eye, and the short length of its chain was such that, pulled from his breast pocket, it lay over his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, for all the good it wouldn’t do, and turned to lead them deep into the depths of archives, then deeper, and deeper again, toward a point where the architecture fell out of its balance and shifted, fading from brick walls into a stone service corridor, then to a claustrophobic tunnel, then finally a mine hacked into the ground.

Jon stopped in his tracks, keeping his assistants a good distance away; they peered into it over his shoulders, naked horror on their faces.

“Best not to get too close,” Jon advised, placing his statements on the floor far from the point at which it became dirt.

“Was that… there before?” asked Martin apprehensively, still scanning the new maw in the ground, hugging his pile to his chest.

“No.” Jon muttered. “It’s becoming easier for these things to manifest: doorways, passages, mouths that should never be. _Something_ ’s getting closer, and it’s bringing the others with it, too.”

He braced himself, drew on all the powers of Beholding he had ever touched, and slammed open the Eye, making as though to stride toward the passage.

Tim grabbed his sleeve in instinctive alarm; Jon Saw before it happened but didn’t manage to stop him. Loud in his mind, he could hear thoughts of _damn little brother always throwing himself into whatever silly obsession he’s got himself into this time, no matter how dangerous_ echoing out from Tim, who was looking at Jon and seeing someone else.

“Whoa, wait, you can’t seriously be planning to just jump head-first into the weird arcane tunnel, that’s-”

“It has to be me,” Jon insisted, voice heavy with the truth. “I’m tied to this place, and the statements will anchor me. It has to be _now_ , before she sinks too deep.”

Still reluctant, Tim slowly prised his fingers free.

Jon allowed himself one last glance into the gaping blackness of the tunnel, one last moment of fear, one last shaking breath before he walked forward.

“I hate the dark,” he whispered to himself.

And then he descended into it, one terrible step at a time, until all that he could see was earth.

*

“…Martin,” said Tim, very quietly. “How many eyes does Jon have?”

Martin swallowed hard.

“Only two,” he replied.

But he didn’t sound sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- The Buried, not really present, but the main topic  
> \- Self-loathing and guilt  
> \- Direct threat of abuse from Magnus


	8. Anabasis

The moment he entered the pit, time shifted, went out of reality. Jon could hear his pocket watch ticking away, but he couldn’t hold onto how many seconds had passed, or if the spaces between the ticks even represented a second anymore. He had no idea how long he had been moving before he was barely doing more than squirming - not down, anymore, it was more horizontal than that, along a hairline crack in the never-easing crush. Space had little meaning here; the dimensions of _up_ and _out_ had decisively ceased to exist.

He could hear people wailing, far off. Whether they actually spoke aloud or not, he couldn’t say, but he could hear them, begging for him to save them, pleading that they couldn’t breathe. Jon could barely breathe. He couldn’t See here - it was so dark, so horribly close and obscure - and he couldn’t find them with Beholding, nor with his mundane senses, their cries echoing too distantly through the narrow tunnels and distorting in the packed soil.

But he wasn’t here for them: he was here for Sasha, following the thin, invisible thread of their entwined connection to the Eye. Jon could feel his bonds to the Institute drawn taut, gradually becoming fainter and fainter the further he travelled into the Buried.

Ignoring the scrapes and bruises that resisting the press of this place earned him, Jon grit his teeth tight and pushed on. He would try not to think of it, he resolved. There was nothing he could do now, other than to pray that his plan would work: no going back, no escape route, no way for even the Ceaseless Watcher to pierce the endless dirt and muck. The very air was heavy down here, coating his lungs with dust when he managed to take a laboured breath. He was more thirsty than he had thought it possible to be, but he couldn’t afford to indulge despair. Dehydration would not kill him. Nothing ever would, here, no matter how the walls felt like they were on the verge of grinding his bones to dust.

There was a metallic _crunch_ beneath his chest as he crawled another aching inch; the pocket watch broke and fell silent under the immense pressure. Another thing for Mister Magnus to scold him for, no doubt, although Jon wondered whether he would remember to include something so minor in among the list of Jon’s many and varied other sins.

He tried to wrench himself further on, and was forced still with an involuntary noise of pain by the earth shifting around him.

“No,” Jon whispered, wasting what little air he had, but he _couldn’t be_ -

He was. He was stuck.

With a deafening rumble of rocks crunching against rocks, the Buried moved, grindingly slow but inevitable, crushing Jon impossibly tight in its grip.

For what felt like an interminable stretch of agony, he was helpless to move, to do anything but whimper as the life surely should have been squeezed from his body. It could have been minutes or months; Jon had no way to tell.

And then there was the rumble of a landslide, again, and this time the dirt opened up and let Jon fall deeper into its embrace, the relief of being able to do more than just twitch his fingers warring with the terror of being _even further_ from the sane world. When he reached out with his mind this time there were desperate cries, no distant whisper of statements being read, none of the concentrated power of the Institute.

But there was something other than dirt, too, somewhere close, familiar, known to him… 

“Sasha!”

Jon seized blindly at the sense of her: she was here, near enough to touch if only he could orient himself enough to figure out where, _alive_. He mustered his strength again to shout, trying desperately not to hack at the mud that found its way into his throat.

“ _Sasha!_ ”

From somewhere below him there was the scrabble of something rummaging, scratching, against the pressing earth, and as though from very far away 

“Jon?”

*

“Sasha - are you hurt? Can you reach me?”

There was another faint rustle of movement, a strained intake of breath.

“I’m dreaming,” she whispered to herself, and despite her words Jon felt himself relax slightly at the knowledge of her presence: she could speak, she was within his grasp. “I can’t tell where you are… where _I_ am, I’m… there was a tunnel, I fell-”

“I know. It’s alright, Sasha, I know, I came to…” The grandiose nature of his announcement of his purpose felt wrong, under the circumstances, and he swallowed it. “I’m right next to you, I promise. Just reach out.”

“I _can’t move_ ,” she insisted, audibly pained, tearful, and guilt wrenched at Jon’s chest. “Even if I - if I could, there’s no way out, no escape, not ever.”

“Follow my voice,” he tried again, as powerful as he could. “I’m here. I have a plan.”

She struggled again. A mere human’s strength against the entire weight of existence wasn’t much, of course, but that wasn’t the point: the act of pushing back in itself, denying the fear, would go most of the way to saving her. Jon knew that, and still couldn’t bring himself to do it, but - Sasha was brave, she was strong, he was sure she could do it.

“Where are we, Jon?” came her voice after a few seconds, exhausted, baffled, still fighting against the weight.

“We’re in the Buried,” Jon breathed instantly, glad of any connection to the truth, the Eye. The ground tightened around him, as though responding to the sound of its own name. “The - ah - the Too Close I Cannot Breathe, the- _ah_ , I can’t -”

“Jon?”

She sounded scared for him, he didn’t mean to do that - but she also sounded closer.

“I’m alright,” he wheezed. “I’m still here.”

“Cannot Breathe,” Sasha murmured, very strained. “Yes, that’s right. _Why?_ ”

“That’s a very long story,” Jon said in a small voice. “There’s a… power, a manifestation of a fear, and it. It, uh,”

“It ate me?” asked Sasha, in what he thought was probably meant to be a joke. Her voice fell flat; she sounded appalled.

“Yes,” he admitted. “More or less.”

They were so close, now: Jon pushed through packed earth as hard as he could, and managed to reach out in the thick darkness, groping fingers blindly brushing against tattered silk. Sasha - her sleeve, it must have been her sleeve - jolted in shock and then grabbed him back, her hand clamped white-knuckle around his. He didn’t fight the hold. It was a better hurt than the Buried pressing in.

“Jon! You’re-” She sobbed, just once. “Y-You’re real, you’re actually here.”

“I am, I just need to f-find the way out, and- and then we can…”

Jon reached for Beholding, as he had on his descent, listened carefully for the faint, constant sounds of Tim and Martin reading, the stale, comforting terror radiating from their well-worn words.

He couldn’t feel any of it.

Instead, when he opened his Eyes, awareness of the fulness of the Buried rushed into his mind: an endless ground without sea or sky, without horizon or surface of any kind. It quaked and shifted against itself constantly in a war of pressure, fighting to push in ever closer, to achieve the impossible centre of a place with edges. It was without beginning or end, unfathomably vast in every direction, incomprehensibly full, utterly apathetic to the tiny, writhing creatures trapped within. He could see nothing through the eternal, opaque dirt. There was nothing to see.

“Oh god,” Jon choked. “It’s too - I can’t - I-I can’t hear them - I don’t know, where to -”

Sasha tugged him a little closer to her, jerking him out of his horrified rambling. In the gloom she still wasn’t fully visible, but he could feel her relief to have company, even though they were still trapped. They were trapped _together_ , now, at least, and that was better than being alone. He could also sense her remorse for thinking such a thing.

The Ceaseless Watcher was too far away from here. Jon tilted his head back - not up, he had no idea at all whether that was _up_ , only a vague sense that in a normal world it might have been something close to it - and thought hard, trying to summon every scrap of knowledge on the Buried he had ever stumbled across. It was so hard to try and keep his thoughts in any kind of order in his head; he desperately needed to think of an escape before this place moved again and filled his body with soil.

“A-Are you still there, Jon?”

He didn’t know how long he’d been quiet. Sasha’s fingers were clutched tight on his unresponsive hand - he didn’t squeeze back, he wasn’t strong enough.

But her question sent the faintest sparks of an idea through him, one that made him almost sick with guilt. He didn’t have time to explain or ask permission; later he would ask forgiveness, he decided.

“Sasha,” he began to Ask, reverberant with compulsion, quick so this place couldn’t shift and stop him. “What are you feeling?”

“I’m scared,” she answered instantly, in that hazy, dream-like tone, trying to forget where she was. Jon opened his eyes wide and fed hungrily on her words. “I’m so - I’ve never been so scared, and it’s a new, horrid kind of terror, like the fulfilment of my most secret nightmares. Something I’ve always feared but never thought would really get me. Like I’ve been waiting for the axe to fall for so long that I had stopped actually expecting the blade - and when it did cut, it was so much worse than I had dared to hope.

“I’ve never been able to breathe easily. I think I only started to be afraid once I realised what it meant, being a girl, being the thing not allowed to run or play or make noise, but even before then, I wasn’t allowed to breathe. They were always telling me not to move, a-and I tri-tried to get away from them, and I couldn’t - and now, now I’ll n-never see the sky again.

“You kn-know, I thought, when I woke up here, after I fell - I thought I had d-died and I was in hell, my own special hell. It comes and goes like the tides in here, the crush, it eases back like a predator playing with its food. So the anticipation drives you half-mad, waiting for it to hurt you again, frightened that this will be the time it just doesn’t stop. Just like every opportunity I’ve had on the outside, too. And it made me realise, w-what’s been happening to me, since I started working at the Institute.

“I’ve always hated people looking at me. It’s a threat - do men know that? That their eyes are dangerous? I think women know; when it’s all you’re permitted to do, looking, you know how to use it. But… I could breathe, in the archives, sometimes. When you were staring straight at me and I was too busy being pinioned by your gaze to think about breathing. What _was_ that? It - it wasn’t _worse_ , but - how could you do that? And how could you know, a-about the doorways, and the madness, and watching, and, and, _here_ , and not tell us? Jon?”

Jon shuddered, filled with the overwhelmed, sated feeling of a statement.

“I Know,” he whispered, so quietly that Sasha would barely be able to hear. “I know where they are - I can’t reach them yet, but I…”

“ _Jon_?” she demanded, fear rising in her again that he had suffocated.

“I’m sorry, Sasha,” he said, smothering cautious hope with rightful shame. “I am, truly, I - I thought that playing sceptic would keep it away from you, as much as possible. You were already… I could feel _this_ place near you, and I didn’t want you to risk going any deeper into this world. The Institute - the power inside it - preys on knowledge, and I hoped if you didn’t know, maybe you could get away. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t speak as she absorbed the information, and then:

“What about you?”

He hadn’t expected that - he blinked, soil falling from his eyelashes and stinging in his eyes.

“What?”

Did he… prey on knowledge too? He did, in a fashion, and he would confess it to her if she asked.

“‘This world’, you’re already in it, Jon. Is that how you…? You sought too far, and fell?”

“No,” he said, after a moment. “No. I was brought inside, for a purpose.”

Around them, the ground began to vibrate again, a dull, threatening rumble as it started to shifted. They clasped their joined hands tighter, both suddenly afraid to be pulled apart.

“I’ve got you,” said Sasha, more of a reassurance to herself than anything. “You’re real and you’re right here.”

“You are too.”

A small giggle, sore and mirthless, escaped her throat.

“Holding hands with a young man before marriage,” she said, in a mockery of her mother’s voice. Jon braced himself, momentarily unable to reply as the new angle of the grinding earth constrained his ribs and threw him toward her, his bony shoulder colliding with what he was fairly certain was her upper back.

“And pressed so intimate,” he rasped, similarly scandalised, just to hear her laugh as much as was possible under the circumstances.

That was cut off abruptly when the Buried quaked again, uncaringly pressing them both together and apart.

Very distantly, through the dirt in his ears, Jon could hear Martin and Tim’s alternating voices, their words unintelligible but steady, rhythmic. He clung to it like a lifeline.

*

“ _…pale with dust, except for a stark line where the train of its dress was dragging behind it. I remember wondering whether it walked exactly the same route through the house always, as I saw other clean lines of passage in the rooms we passed through. None of the other furniture looked used…_ ”

Jon jerked out of his stupor, suddenly able to make out _words_ from the surface, ones he recognised. Secondhand fear that he had consumed before.

 _“…and I began to feel very uneasy at this point, but whatever powers of persuasion the vampire had calmed me enough to_ …”

That was Tim’s voice, slightly shaky, but pressing on regardless, which could only mean that-

“They’re closer- we’re closer, we -”

He was talking, Jon realised, without having to struggle to get the words out. He had enough air to _talk easily_. Both of them had been quiet, too distracted by unbearable fear and pain and too physically crushed to speak for another agonising, immeasurable stretch of time, being constantly, gradually moved with their hands interlinked the entire time. But now he could talk.

“Sasha!”

“Jon, I’m-” She coughed tiredly. “I’m here, Jon, w-what’s going on?”

“I can feel them,” he said, trying to contain his surprise and excitement. “I can hear what they’re saying-”

“What? Who?”

“Tim, and M-Martin, in the Institute, they’re-”

He squirmed against the muck in what he was beginning to think was the direction of escape, reaching for one last reserve of strength in Beholding. Although he was straining to See through solid mass, an impossible task, he couldn’t help but think he was beginning to be able to make out vague shapes in the darkness.

“Can’t you hear them?”

“ _…fruit was clearly a few weeks old, and in various stages of rotting, but just to appease the thing I found an apple that seemed edible and took a bite. It watched me silently the whole time_ …”

Sasha didn’t reply quickly, but Jon was already pushing, grunting behind his teeth as he began to shove back against the Buried - and as the Buried began to move to his efforts.

“I don’t understand, Jon - slow down, I-I can’t-”

“Don’t let go, we’re so close,”

There was light, it was not a trick of his mind: almost imperceptible, only the very faintest twilight filtering through to the Forever Deep, but still light. Enough for Jon to See.

“Here - I know the way up! It’s here, Sasha, _push_ ,”

Her desperation to escape was stronger than the exhaustion of being crushed, and she managed to find the strength inside her to heave upwards too. And after a moment it _caved_ and fell away. No longer bracing against solid stone or struggling futilely through packed earth, but instead digging up, scrabbling through the loose soil, they managed to come up into a narrow crevice. It wasn’t a proper passage by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a pocket of undisturbed space, at least for those few seconds.

Sasha gasped frantically, taking her first half-free breaths of dusty air.

But Jon didn’t dare to stop moving, and he continued to drag her up through the gradually-widening crack as the texture of the rock around them roughened, forming footholds. They were too steep, designed only to entrap, never to allow anything to climb out again. But Jon Knew the safest way free, knew how to clamber up the sides - for the middle of every precipitous step was worn smooth by thousands of hapless, tripping victims - until they were burrowing out through a steep tunnel.

“.. _.what they do with the bodies of their victims, as they do not have any mechanism for eating solid food, and I do not believe there are many, if any, cases of murder where the body_ is found _\- is found completely,_ um _, without blood -_ what’s that sound?”

“Tim, oh my god, is that them?!”

The familiar voices washed over him. Jon’s head was swimming, body aching all over, and he knew that Sasha was worse. It was astonishing that she was still able to move, but they couldn’t stop and let it consume them again. They had no choice but to press on, until they were so close to the surface that the light began to blind Jon, rather than fill him with the thrill of being able to See again. He almost didn’t have the strength to drag himself back into the solace of his own domain, the place his whole being embraced as the temple to his dread god.

But he managed to scrape his fingertips over the threshold, buckling, and the moment that he did there were human hands - comforting, limited, taking hold of only a fraction of him, not grasping all of him tight at once and squeezing his life away - snatching them both and pulling them to freedom.

Finally, Jon allowed his body to go limp. Above him - up and down, absolute and unchanging now, thank god - was clean air, dry and just a little too cold, as always in the archives, smelling of paper and wood varnish and ever so slightly of the London street outside. He was still too dazzled to see much, but the red of the gas lamp behind his closed lids was familiar. And there were frantic voices, too, no longer filling his ears with the buzz of the statements and their power, but snapping back and forth, distinctly panicked.

“She’s still not breathing right - what can we do, should we -”

“A doctor? Or?”

Jon forced his tired eyes open. He was lying in the archives, on his side, facing a slumped Sasha, the Ceaseless Watcher’s power still coursing through him. Past Tim and Martin’s hunched forms over her, he could see her face, unnaturally still. It filled him with sudden, shocking outrage - the idea that he could pull _his friend_ from the crush, only for her to die in _his domain_ was intolerable.

He hauled himself up with a grip on the closest desk to claw his way toward his own drawer. There was blood on the floor - his own, he realised, with some annoyance - that he almost slipped on and staggered back down, colliding with his assistants as he did so.

“Jon!”

“You really shouldn’t be standing Jon - whoa, definitely shouldn’t be holding-”

Obstinate, Jon ignored them and leaned over Sasha, reaching down with his letter-opener - kept too sharp, he knew, but he had had to fend off more than one aggressive statement-giver, and it was useful to have around - to clumsily cut the laces on the back of her corset and wrench it open.

She took a deep, shuddering breath as Jon let go of the knife and it clattered to the floor. 

Jon felt his patron’s power leave him, and crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- misogyny  
> \- Severe Buried content (see: ep.132), including:  
> \- claustrophobia  
> \- choking  
> \- restricted breathing  
> \- injury by crushing


	9. Aftershocks

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's rough.

“Here, eat this.”

The bowl of soup that Martin put in front of him was frankly unreasonably large. Jon looked at it dubiously, and received Martin’s equivalent of a stern glare.

“ _All_ of it.”

His tone didn’t allow any compromise; with no other choice, Jon rolled his eyes and joined Sasha in eating, ignoring the others. Sasha was wearing her wool shawl to cover her wrecked dress, and the mustard-yellow was a rare bright spot in the office. Perhaps it was silly, but it felt like something in which he could bask, an important part of the quiet comfort of being alive and free and safe with his assistants. Jon had conceded to remove only his necktie and the remains of his shattered pocket-watch, but Sasha had been woken at some point in their long unconsciousness by a stray pin and clumsily let down her hair, and she looked very different; lighter, somehow. In the midst of greeting her when she woke, Tim had interrupted himself to blurt that he had never realised how long her hair must be to fit into the loops and ringlets it did, _it must take forever_ , and Jon had, drowsily, heard her laugh unguarded.

A day and a half resting was a long time, even if Martin and Tim were both prepared to be patient, happy enough that Jon and Sasha were only shallowly injured and awake. There was an expectant air around them, though; the others’ eyes were full of formless questions and trepidatious assumptions when they looked at Jon. He was supposed to recover cautiously, to eat, but also to explain himself - eventually the pressure of unspoken words became too much, and he set down his spoon, disregarding Martin’s bothered little sigh.

“…I don’t know how to speak of these things,” Jon said, examining of the grain of the wood on the desk that they were using as a table. “Not to… people who don’t already know.”

In truth, no one had ever explained it to him, not really. Jon had gone through the arduous task of piecing together descriptions and experiences of fear together over the years, until he simply understood. His duty was to learn, Mister Magnus had used to tell him. And Jon had done so.

“It doesn’t have to be now,” Martin offered, hand brushing close to Jon’s own. “If it’s too hard.”

“It does. I should have never tried to hide it, but I didn’t know how, and - I thought it might be safer.” Jon hunched his shoulders. “You’re in danger.”

“Well, you are too,” objected Tim, raising his eyebrows pointedly at a particularly rough scrape on Jon’s lower arm. He shook his head.

“That’s not what I mean,” Jon tried to continue, but he hesitated another moment, his head pounding at the thought, the overwhelming scope of it, the sudden anxiety that they wouldn’t believe him.

“He means Magnus.” said Sasha softly.

His eyes snapped up toward her - of all people he would have thought Martin might have been the one to call attention to their employer, him being the one of them to have met Magnus at a time of vulnerability, straight from the Lonely. But instead it was Sasha, so sure and analytic that he couldn’t deny it.

“I’m not sure when it was,” she continued, shrugging her shawl a little tighter around her. “Sometime during the night, I think. You two must either have been asleep or have left for a few moments, Martin, Tim - you said you would be right outside, and I… I believe you, but, Magnus was still there, despite that. He must not have realised that I was conscious enough to overhear, or else aware enough to remember, but I heard him. He was threatening Jon.”

Jon couldn’t look away from her as she continued to describe what she had seen, the memory so vivid in his mind that he barely listened to the words.

Mister Magnus had shaken Jon awake in dim candlelight and put him on his feet; for a moment Jon had been afraid that he would fall, but he managed to put his back to the office wall and stay upright, trying desperately to focus on his master and not sway.

 _It seems that you_ **_are_ ** _making a habit of this kind of behaviour after all_ , Magnus had accused him. _Not so surprising, considering your weakness toward the Blackwood boy._

Jon, head swimming, voice still no more than a croak after the Buried, had tried to say _no, sir_ \- but Magnus had snapped that _if I had known that this was the kind of ingratitude that I was going to be shown then perhaps I would not have invested so much care in your education._

Sasha had heard Jon’s breathing grow faster; Jon didn’t remember that, exactly, only the terror as Mister Magnus stepped closer, spoke more softly, more biting. There had been calculating concern painted over his face, dangerous protectiveness in his voice.

_Perhaps if you are so eager for confinement I ought to simply lock you in a chest. It would certainly make it easier to keep you safe, that way._

“It sounded as though it should be said in jest,” Sasha said. “But he was serious as the grave.”

She couldn’t know what Jon did, of course: that such a chest did exist, waiting ominously in artefact storage, and that Jon had once taken the statement of a harbour official who had spent a nightmarish few days inside. So soon after leaving the Forever Deep, Jon didn’t think he would be able to come through another ordeal of claustrophobia, and he had only been able to wheeze back _please, sir, I’m sorry, I’ll do my utmost not to disappoint in future, I swear to you, I j-just couldn’t leave her-_

Magnus had let him run out of breath before he commented next.

_…No. Not the Box, I think, Jonathan. You’ve lost enough time in the Buried that might have been put to better use, and I need you still in full possession of all your faculties. You will come to my study at seven sharp tomorrow evening, for further discussion of this disobedience. Do I make myself clear?_

Jon had nodded quickly.

_Until then, boy, I advise you to get a hold of yourself and align yourself back with your patron._

All this, Sasha related, but she was kind enough not to say what happened afterwards. If she had heard Jon’s quiet panic as Magnus left, how he eventually collapsed into exhausted, dreamless sleep again, she didn’t mention it. When she was done, they turned back to him: there was an unfamiliar kind of anger in Martin, something that sparked dissent and made him far more solid than he could sometimes still be.

“That’s monstrous,” he burst out. “You can’t just _accept_ that Jon - he’s - for _saving Sasha_ -!”

“He would hurt you for that?” agreed Tim, outraged, bristling.

Jon hesitated. Just a moment before, Tim had been looking at him with - with concern, yes, but also suspicion. He had seen something he should not have, as Jon called on Beholding, and it could not be unseen. Except that now he seemed almost ready to confront Magnus on Jon’s behalf; a confrontation that, Jon knew, would end in catastrophe.

“Mister Magnus can do as he likes,” Jon protested back, weakly. “It won’t… he said he would need me able to perform my duties, Tim, I don’t believe I’ll be _damaged._ There’s nothing I can do, nothing any of us can do. Magnus is too powerful.”

“Well-”

“And not just powerful in the normal manner.”

From the tight press of Martin’s lips, he knew that the topic of his treatment was far from finished. But they had arrived again at the centre of the problem, of the secret world superimposed on the everyday they understood, to which Jon - and they, now - belonged. He could sense the fragments of the truth each knew turning over like cogs in their mind, half missing, all parts of a whole that the Eye inside Jon wanted to ask them for in turn and watch them try and piece together. But he was not cruel, and he would not do that to them.

He drew himself up, and spoke in his most measured tone.

“There are… entities, dark and malicious beings, of incomprehensible power. Gods, some would say. Not a part of the world - the real, physical world of logic - but tied to it, on the outside always pressing in through the cracks in reality, warping and changing it to their will. Like ivy creeping in through a broken window - but if ivy was formed of evil, determined to hurt, and if it could, uh, c-could get inside human beings and persuade them to help it spread.”

Jon’s lips twisted in distaste at the image he had created - he didn’t doubt that the Corruption would delight in making such an analogy literal, if it hadn’t already.

“All they wish to do is spread, like a plague, to infect and devour and rise in power. They’re, made of fear,” he continued, blunt as he could, even if simply stating such a fact felt wrong, dangerous; as if acknowledging a terror would only invite it. “The thirteen base fears; primordial, intuitive. The fear of being trapped, for instance, or being alone, or… being watched.”

There were identical looks of pale, awful comprehension on their faces. Not belief, not fully, but understanding of what the prickling sensation of the Eye was, now. Jon swallowed and went on.

“The entities create places, relics, monsters - and servants, humans that they, ah, grant certain abilities, in order to propagate that fear.”

“A deal with the devil,” offered Martin, foreboding.

Jon nodded. “Or, a deal with one of thirteen terrible aspects of him, yes.”

The word _psychic_ was very loud in Tim’s mind again. Sasha’s head was tilted slightly in consideration.

“But then… a great many people must know of these ‘beings’, to choose to serve them?”

A conspiracy, she was wondering.

“No, I don’t think so. They’ve only been scientifically described very recently, but we believe they have existed forever. The relationship of an avatar to a entity is not as straightforward as that, it’s more about… will, I think? Most people don’t consciously _choose_ to serve fear, but nor is it so simple as merely being so afraid that it seeps inside. It’s being so scared that you’ll take any way out, or decide the only way not to fear it is to inflict it on others, or try to run from a terror you do not understand toward one that you do. And once you’ve been put on the path it’s never fully possible to turn back. People are… complicated, difficult, and most don’t _want_ to turn back.”

Jon hugged himself as subtly as he could, hoping it only seemed as though his arms were crossed.

“The Magnus Institute isn’t… it’s not the Institute’s purpose, exactly, but a byproduct of cataloging fear is studying the entities. They flow and ebb, and - it’s possible to tell, when one is becoming more powerful than the others, when a certain fear has taken hold, or is about to t-try and start a ritual, in an attempt to alter the world to their liking.”

“That’s what’s happening?” asked Martin, gesturing to the disrupted research they had poured the last few months of work into. “The madness?”

Jon nodded, and opened his mouth to give a name to the Spiral. But Tim was speaking, a discomfort in his voice as though he was tasting the words on his tongue and finding them bitter.

“And that’s what happened to you, too. You serve Mister Magnus, and he serves fear. And we serve you, I suppose.”

“I didn’t want this for you.”

Tim’s expression twitched strangely.

“Nor we for you, Jon. But you said there’s no stopping it now, and you pulled Sasha out of a nightmare; Martin, too, I’d wager.”

A look of brief, painful guilt crossed Tim’s face, the sum of a sea of roiling emotions, and he barely kept the question he so desperately wanted to ask behind his teeth: whether Tim, or Jon, or _anyone_ could have done the same for Danny, freed him from the circus’s grip. But Jon was young, and slight, and his paranormal gifts were almost nothing compared to his achingly ordinary strangeness - and he had risked a wrath he clearly feared above all else to throw himself into hell for his friends.

Tim still wanted to protect him, Jon could feel it.

If Tim discovered that he had been bound by Magnus’s contract, unable to ever escape, and that Jon had known and stayed silent, he wouldn’t want to protect him anymore. He would probably, rightfully, be furious. Jon was too much of a selfish coward to tell them now. If they had any sense then they would try to leave and thereby discover it for themselves - but he wasn’t strong enough to put it into words.

“So we… continue on?” Tim asked.

“We rest first,” Martin insisted, mitigating the firmness of his tone with a glance to Sasha that said he was really speaking to Jon.

“Alright,” Jon said, trying not to look too obviously overcome. He could rest; Magnus had said to see him _tomorrow evening_ , he had until then to pause. Although, there was work to do, and if he was still he knew his mind would dwell on what might be done to him, and-

“Come on, Jon, it’s not like the world is going to end if you do.”

“The Spiral, the entity of madness, I think its ritual is going to start soon. That _would_ be, uh, potentially apocalyptic.”

Sasha’s raised eyebrow felt astonishingly harsh from a woman who had only narrowly avoided suffocation a few hours before.

“Today?”

“…not _today_ , no,” he grumbled.

“Then you have time to eat your soup.”

*

Jon knew Magnus’s study almost as intimately as his own bedroom. The high ceiling, the long, grand windows; more so the rich, glossy brown of his master’s desk, or the intricate geometry of the Persian rug’s woven flowers, which Jon was accustomed to bowing his head and staring at. He knew the room in the daylight, full of knowledge and scrupulously free of dust. Jon had stood and recited his bewildering lessons here as a child, had read or researched statements from the imposing shelves where Magnus kept his most valuable and secret volumes, had even sat stiffly in the leather armchairs with his thin legs dangling and listened to his master lecture. 

At night, however, the room took on another aura. It became what it had always been, in truth: a temple, a site of menace that observed Jon hungrily. When he was younger he had known instinctively that to enter this place after dark, without Magnus’s presence, would be to invite the attention of something terrible.

Now, after a full day spend dreading the discipline that had been promised, he felt almost the same gnawing dread as he raised his fist to knock upon its door. It would be cold, he knew; Mister Magnus never drew the curtains, and heat leeched away through his elegant windows. Jon would have to endeavour not to shiver and appear cowardly. The presence of the Ceaseless Watcher would be unmistakable. In his own centre of power, Magnus needed no false eyes through which to See, and the entire study was soaked in the gut-wrenching awareness of _being watched_. That, too, must be endured without flinching.

“Come in, Jonathan.”

The click of the door as he closed it behind him felt horribly final. From the windows behind the desk, city twilight cast the room in shades of blue.

“Look at me, boy.” 

Magnus’s eyes on him as he walked forward - not hesitantly, he wasn’t stupid, but probably still with some of the nerves he felt on his face - were devoid of any anger they had held the previous night, and his expression was stern, but almost magnanimous. Jon was… well, he supposed he was glad. This would be no more or less than he deserved.

“I don’t wish to hurt you,” Magnus said, chidingly. Jon so badly wanted to drop his eyes in shame, to stare at his polished shoes on the rug, just like he had used to; but he had been ordered to look, and so he did. “I don’t enjoy it. And of course I am pleased Miss James was preserved; my objection is only with your methods of doing so. You require correction before you stray too severely - correction for what, if you please?”

Jon wetted his dry lips, and tentatively listed out the sins over which he had reflected, trying not to cringe.

“For disobedience, irresponsibility, and recklessness, sir.”

“Quite.”

Magnus brushed an imaginary piece of lint from his jacket, pausing as though to savour the moment.

“You know that there are rules for a reason, boy. I am even prepared to be relatively lenient toward the disruption to my archives - but the frank insubordination of _hiding_ like a recalcitrant child, not to mention another instance of interference, and wildly overexerting yourself against the Forever Deep… well, all this must be answered for. As must the root of the problem, itself: we both know that if you had not been careless enough to allow Miss James to fall to the Buried in the first place, this would not have happened. The archival assistants are in your charge, as you are in mine. That can be more a drain than an asset. Your caretakers have often felt that way, I was warned - what is it they said? Willful, impertinent boy. Of course, I am the only one of them left.”

He made eye contact with Jon at the last word, and all at once Jon Knew.

A flash of memory, first: his grandmother, as she had been when Jon had last seen her at the gate of the workhouse, her weathered hand squeezing his one last time before she let go. Her grey hair under her white cap was as he remembered it, and the look on her face as her tired eyes looked down at him in regret - but the knowledge of what she had _thought_ when she had looked down at him was like a knife through his brain.

 _She hadn’t wanted another child, had barely wanted the first. Her son had been hers, though, a sweet boy, and Jon had always been nothing more than a red-faced, shrieking little creature: first a squalling baby, a toddler bawling and bawling at his father’s funeral, then clinging heavily in her arms at his mother’s, a grouchy small boy exhausted from coming to work with her far too young; always so loud, so curious and impatient, and_ **_far too much_ ** _. It wasn’t his fault, he couldn’t help being a child, but he was a burden too great for her to bear. Of all her family,_ **_this_ ** _exhausting child was the only last remaining fragment, and she couldn’t help but resent him for it._

Jon was lost in a blinding clash of thought and identity: he was his grandmother, he was himself, he was eight and he was unwanted, he was eighteen and he was a disappointment. As though from a great distance away, he thought he might have heard himself whimper. 

“She could have visited you at any time in the workhouse if she so wished, but of course she never did, did she? Impossible, now. Such a shame, the way these institutions neglect sanitation.”

Another image, stark and awful and true and so saturated with the Creeping Rot that Jon gagged helplessly _._

_His grandmother, too ill to move, mottled blue and purple, lying defenceless as the porter did his rounds. The workhouse was so prone to outbreaks of disease - so many people, in such close and dirty conditions - and elderly wards even more so than most. No one had noticed anything odd, anything wrong: no one had even commented on how unusual the new porter seemed to be, restless and antsy, his skin always hot and drenched in sweat, eyes always glassy, his uniform hanging loose around him. Perhaps it was her imagination, but whenever he visited she seemed to lose more of her ability to think clearly, the bulging yellow-white leaking rash along her whole body to grow worse, the flies that buzzed around the beds of the dying to increase._

_“How are we feeling today, Mrs Sims?”_

_She opened her mouth around her swollen tongue to try and speak. Weakly, she knew that she wanted to tell him that the sickly-stinging pain of the sepsis was unbearable, that she was afraid, that the woman in the bed next to her had been dead for near two days and no one had moved to do anything._

_But what came up out of her throat were not words but creatures: buzzing, crawling, many-legged. She choked in horror as life left her and spewed out into the room to infect the others._

_Her last sight was the strange porter inhaling, deep and rapturous; hungrily taking in the scent of putrid death._

The Corruption filled Jon’s brain, searing images behind his eyes so deeply that he knew he would never be free of it. Instinctively, he covered his face, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes - but it was no use, he could never unknow it. She suffered slowly and horribly, and he was aware of every second, every ounce of terror that Amherst had fed upon. He was outside his body, consumed by the sight, the sensations, the pain and fear and disgust.

Jon hadn’t even been aware that his grandmother was dead.

By the time he came back to himself it was truly night, the shadows cast from every corner of the room deep and velvet black. 

Jon was curled prone on the floor by the desk. There were tear-tracks drying down his face, though he was no longer actively crying; every part of him felt numb, but he still shook with the aftermath of the horror. He didn’t remember falling.

In his peripheral vision he saw Mister Magnus reach down, and twitched nervously away. But no strike came, nor fingers on his chin forcing him to look up; the hand simply rested on Jon’s shoulder, and against his will Jon found himself relaxing at the weight of it. There was no pain or writhing, slick touch of Corruption, and the absence of hurt felt almost like reassurance.

After a moment, Magnus got up from his desk and left Jon lying there alone.

He had to get up. His master would not be pleased to find him still hunched on the floor come morning. But for the moment he was incapable of doing anything but pressing his face against the carpet, screwing his eyes shut tight against what he had Seen.

He couldn’t say how long it was before he had the strength to move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Heavy emotional abuse, manipulation, and neglect  
> \- Jon's negative self-worth, including as a small child  
> \- Threatened physical confinement as a punishment  
> \- Telepathic assault by Magnus  
> \- Description of someone's death by Corruption (see: ep.36)  
> If you want to skip the Corruption segment, scroll from Magnus saying _"Impossible, now.”_ to the line _Jon hadn’t even been aware_.
> 
> This and the next were meant to all be the same chapter, but they were too long, so I had to split them up. Next chapter is less intense.


	10. Confer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two Sashas: before the Buried, and after it, experimenting with some more comfortable clothes :)

A sharp rap on his desk shattered Jon’s fragile concentration, startling his nose out of the book it was buried in. Martin, looking apologetic but unrepentant, was standing over him, speaking over his shoulder toward the office entrance.

“He’s even worse if he’s reading a statement. I reckon the building could collapse on him and he still wouldn’t notice, or stop.”

Jon stashed the book away, glad that Martin couldn’t read its Latin title and didn’t know that it was, appropriately, on victims of ensorceled trance states. Standing, he could see that the person in the entrance was Melanie King, arms folded and a smirk on her face - Jon, if only to keep up appearances, scowled back.

Just because he was responsible for her presence here, didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

The day after he was disciplined had been strange. He had slept badly, almost grateful that he couldn’t remember his nightmares the next morning - though by the way his skin crawled, he could guess at them. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw his grandmother dying. The phantom stench of rot lingered in his nose. In every moment of silence he heard insects buzzing.

As always, he had gone to meet with Mister Magnus in his office in the morning, only a little tremulous as he stood before the grand desk and his eyes fell on where he had huddled wretchedly just a few hours before. Magnus hadn’t made any comment out of the ordinary, other than to instruct Jon to fix the shambles he had made of the archives.

Jon’s assistants, however, had noticed at once that he was rattled. He had painstakingly extracted a very reluctant promise from them that they would not press him for details of what action Mister Magnus had taken against him, and though they kept it, they also refused to allow him to work normally in such a state. It was both frustrating and touching; especially because he could still sense uncertainty and misgivings swirling around the air between them.

He couldn’t tell any of them. Even if he wanted to, even if some pathetic part of him yearned to confess the entire horrid affair to Martin and plead for consolation, he knew that the horror of it did not show him well, and so he didn’t dare. The punishment had been fitting, Jon didn’t dispute that. It was as much his fault that his grandmother had been in the workhouse in the first place as it had been that Sasha had slipped into the Buried. He deserved to be made to understand the consequences of his actions. But he still couldn’t really bring himself to regret disobeying; she was safe, and that was worth it. Despite all the bad, his obstinance and faults had come to some good, at least. He just had to learn to thread the needle more carefully.

So he had not really had the strength to resist when Tim and Martin - Sasha recovering in the lodgings they had hastily found for her, safely away from her cousin’s household - had ushered him out of the Institute. They had promised to reorder it thoroughly without him and insisted, for some reason, on him getting ‘fresh air’ and ‘sunshine’, and Jon, still more unbalanced, had found himself absent-mindedly wandering the streets.

This time, Beholding led him to Georgie, nearby her place of work. She had intuited by his bruises and his apparently trembling hands that perhaps allowing him to roam the streets unsupervised might not be wise, and led him over to a park bench in companionable silence. The green smell overwhelmed the stink of death that still filled his mind.

It was strange, the way she never seemed to judge. Abnormal, really. He should ask her about it.

But he was glad to be with Georgie, who was perhaps a friend but didn’t _know_ , couldn’t pity him. For the moment he was grateful to just sit and watch ratty pigeons go about their daily business, and to observe small details of Georgie’s attire: a charcoal grey dress, today, a pillbox ring on her left hand pressed securely shut, those same dried purple flowers tucked into her hair. _Aconite_ , the Eye informed him. Dead, poisonous flowers? That was odd, and maybe not something she should keep against her skin. Still, Jon didn’t know enough of fashion to really raise the question.

“I wonder what’s in the ring,” he mumbled instead, careful not to phrase it in such a way that could accidentally compel her to answer.

Georgie glanced down at it in surprise.

“Not many people notice that it opens. Fairly well hidden, don’t you think, with the way the clasp fits underneath?”

Jon was even more curious now.

“I don’t think I could wear one,” he said, unthinking and distracted. “Too fiddly; I’d lose it. And I notice you didn’t answer.”

“What, Mister Sims, you think I’m some poisoner? Single-handedly working my way through the ranks of the Post Office by eliminating my enemies, am I?”

He smiled weakly.

“Perhaps not.”

“Well, no, not if I’m still handling your letters at the desk after almost five years there.”

She turned her hand to show him the ring more clearly; it was handsome, but a little scratched, clearly secondhand.

“Allowing bold young gentleman to think their affections are returned for a bit is a good way to get trinkets, is all, and I kept it for sentimental value.”

A lie. Still, Jon was trying hard not to interrogate her, and she had given him an answer.

“My companion tells me that you had a rather unfortunate meeting with her,” Georgie went on, rueful but amused. “I know she can be a little abrasive, but I was hoping you two would bond over that rather than clash, if I’m being honest.”

“Your co-” Jon snapped to attention, suddenly realising what probably should have been incredibly obvious. “Melanie King! You’re the friend she mentioned, the person she boards with, of course!”

 _A great deal more than merely friends_ , whispered the Eye. Jon, regularly privy to far more damning pieces of information, ignored it. He would be a hypocrite not to, anyway.

“Yes? Didn’t she mention that I said she ought to talk to you?”

Jon flushed.

“No, I… don’t think either of us were really in much of a state to discuss those kind of particulars.”

Georgie sent him a slyly entertained look that said she knew _exactly_ what had happened.

“Melanie said much the same, only with more unrepeatable language.”

“I- I may have been, possibly, a little unfair to Miss King about her statement,” Jon conceded, and sighed. “There still isn’t much that we could do, but I mean, I shouldn’t have…” 

And in what he would later attribute to an acute state of delirium, he had offered Melanie use of the Magnus Institute’s library and other facilities to do her own research if she wished, at any time she liked; Georgie had seemed pleased, pointed him vaguely in the direction of the archives with a warning not to stay out too late, and he had returned to work and forgotten about it.

To his anguish, Melanie had attempted to call his bluff by taking him up on the offer, then found their resources extremely useful, and simply inserted herself into the archives in the few weeks since. She had also found a great deal of common ground with his archival assistants - Sasha in particular, who as it turned out was housed together with Melanie, but also Martin, for him having named their mutual feline friend. Martin seemed intimidated but pleased by this; Jon wasn’t sure why that felt like a betrayal of the highest degree, and was determined not to examine it.

He had made no attempt to force her to leave, though. Begrudgingly, he could admit that (even still volatile, still thrumming with the barely-repressed power of the Slaughter) she was not actually his nemesis, and he valued Georgie’s friendship enough to deal with some verbal sparring. Besides, Melanie had apparently admitted to Sasha that after she had begun rambling furiously about guns and wounds and visible fear to petty customers who only wanted to ask after their ‘boring’ dead relatives, she had all but lost her business as a medium; being here meant not stewing in her own anger at home.

“Melanie,” he greeted flatly.

“Hello, Jon. I’m told I need your permission to take a look into the artefact storage department?”

She seemed to be offended by the concept of having to ask him for anything. His brow furrowed.

“I would strongly advise against doing that.”

“What, looking at the artefacts? You don’t even know what I’m searching for yet.”

“Just generally.”

Still, he rounded the desk to accompany her toward their secure storage rooms. She was here enough now, with few enough other options, that he thought there was a risk he should probably take steps to avoid.

For a few minutes they talked stiltedly about the object she wanted to examine and the statement in which she had found a mention of it: a rather murderous set of bagpipes, surrendered by Sergeant Clarence Berry along with a statement on his experiences during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, Jon remembered it vividly.

When they reached the door of artefact storage - empty, thank god, their last curator having quit and fled to the countryside to recover - Jon paused.

“Melanie, I very seriously want to request,” he began, very low. “That if my master ever offers you a contract, please, do your best to turn him down.

Her eyes slid away from him, unable to focus. He seemed to be making himself somehow very small, heavily in the shade of the doorway, barely perceptible. This was not a conversation he wished for Mister Magnus to overhear, and so he had done his best to turn the Watcher’s gaze away.

“You must really hate me,” she joked, with that ever-present hint of outrage - but she didn’t object.

Jon supposed he could hope for no more than that, and rolled his eyes as he drew the relevant key from its ring.

“The pipes are too dangerous to touch,” he informed her. “But there’s space in the archival office near Sasha if you want to take their file down there to cross-reference.”

She smacked him affectionately on the shoulder.

It would have to suffice for her safety, for now: there was more research to do on the Spiral’s potential ritual waiting on his desk, and it was beginning to be urgent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't believe any content warnings apply to this chapter. If there's anything you would like me to warn for, please say, there's absolutely no judgement.


	11. Hound

At first, Jon had refused to let Tim near any of the real statements - not that he would have admitted that they were _real_ , either, back then. Jon had always kept them carefully filed away, marked in a system of his own design, which only he knew and he had never expected to have to explain. After the horrible series of revelations that had followed Jon pulling Sasha from the Pit, though, there hadn’t been much point in him continuing to hide true statements. Besides, Tim had made a fairly compelling case to there being _really more of truth to these wolf rumours than you’re giving them credit for, boss_ to a Jon whose resistance to such proclamations had been significantly weakened by his focus on the Spiral and regular bickering with Melanie King. Tim had been pleased - that was, he had been pleased _before_ he began to read them.

The statement that he had just finished rested innocuously before him, as though nothing more than harmless ink scratchings on paper. There had been nothing particularly recent given on witch-hunts, but even those statements that Jon cagily admitted were _stale_ , less powerful, left Tim jumping nervously at shadows, his heart pounding. He couldn’t say he enjoyed the experience at all.

“You alright?” whispered Martin, looking in concern across their desks. Tim pushed a hand through his hair, trying to conjure his usual lightheartedness.

“Yeah, ha, I should be. Just…”

The image of the woman whom the statement-giver had described, hounding _sinners_ out of her village and then stalking them through the woods, the sharpening canines from behind which she had spat judgement, was vivid and bright behind Tim’s closed eyes. He would have taken their words for exaggeration, once. Not anymore.

Martin’s eyes flicked to the statement with wary hostility. He had read them too, of course, to anchor Jon back to the Institute as he went after Sasha: he knew how they were. Martin knew more than he let on in general, actually. He still hadn’t quite told Tim the full story - and Tim hadn’t been able to tell him the truth about Danny, either, so he couldn’t cast judgement - but there had been something arcane about the ship where Martin used to work, something that its captain had done to send him into a hell not unlike the Pit. Naturally, Martin had a right to keep his horrors private, Tim could respect that - but he seemed such an open, amiable person. Stranger to think of Martin keeping a world of evil powers quiet than Jon, whose personality was comprised entirely of secrets.

“Just a lot all at once?”

“Yeah.”

The archives were empty. Sasha had been dragged off to dinner by Melanie and their other cohabitant. Jon had been summoned to one of his daily meetings with Mister Magnus; both were too busy dealing with their own portions of the supernatural underworld to find much time to speak in Magnus’s townhouse office, apparently, though they were coordinating their efforts. From what Martin had told him, Tim suspected that Jon stayed away from Magnus as best he could by keeping to the servants’ quarters in their home, weaponising his master’s own snobbery against him. But Jon wouldn’t admit to attempting to avoid Magnus; he seemed convinced he ought to be thankful, though he had been worked at a debt since childhood, lived in terror of his temper, and Tim hardly thought that… well, much as he knew it had saved his friends, he hardly thought that Beholding was a _gift_ . Whatever it was that Magnus had done to him for his _defiance_ in rescuing Sasha, it had left him weak and nauseous, eyes distant and full of horror. Jon swore up and down that Magnus hadn’t, didn’t beat him, though he wouldn’t say what kind of punishment his master inflicted instead. Magnus had fulfilled the threat made that night, that much was clear, and the thought of it filled Tim was protective rage: perhaps Jon and all his creepy power could take care of himself better than a glance might suggest, but not against the man who had given him that power.

Beneath all the posturing, he thought Jon knew it too. Why else would he have fought so hard against their hiring?

“Ready to get out of here, then?”

Tim seized the excuse gratefully and stood, stretching.

“Thought you’d never ask! I’m starving.”

His dramatic tone earned him a smile, and Martin turned away to gather up a few things, tucking various scraps and papers into his satchel. One of those scraps was a note from Jon, Tim noticed; just an ordinary memo, but addressed specifically to Martin, written and signed unmistakably fondly. He wasn’t unkind enough to point it out. Seeing Martin blush bright red to his ears and embarrassedly cover his face would be fun; seeing him stammer through excuses for fear of condemnation would be less so.

The air outside the Institute was frosty, bracing, and Tim felt his heart rate race back up and his senses seem to sharpen. He tucked his scarf tighter round his neck, shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets, and endeavoured to ignore the prickling unease. Mentally he ticked through each of his friends and their safety - because of the ice, he assured himself, that was all.

“What’s her name again?” he asked Martin, after a few minutes’ brisk walk through the city. “Jon’s associate from the post office?”

“Georgie? Why, reckon you have a chance with her?”

Tim grinned. He had only asked because Sasha had moved in with her, in fact. If Martin couldn’t pick up on the signals that girl put out it was his own business; not like she was particularly subtle, either, with those purple flowers she was always wearing (although he didn’t recognise them as violets).

“Emphatically no. I’m a little scared of the thought of even asking her, with Melanie around.”

Martin hummed in agreement, then added,

“Georgie looks out for the Admiral, too. She’s the one over-feeding him when he’s not in the archives.”

“As opposed to _you_ , the one over-feeding him when he is in the archives.”

“Hush. Yes. Hardly the type to chase rats, is he?”

“I mean, maybe he _used_ to hunt,” Tim tried to tease - but he slipped on the cobblestones, and just managed to catch himself before Martin’s hand grabbed his elbow to steady him, caught off-guard by the conversation’s shift toward hunting, the reminder of his work.

“Jon’s been so preoccupied, usually he meets her outside of the archives,” Martin backpedalled quickly, picking up on his discomfort and trying to change the subject. “Melanie and Sasha do too. I don’t think she likes it down there?”

“I can’t imagine why not,” Tim snorted.

“Well, _yes_ , but I don’t know that it’s just the whole, uh, air that they have. Whenever she’s around the Institute she’s always looking over her shoulder and touching her hairpin, especially around the entrance. Not even nervously, though, just watchfully.”

Tim wasn’t entirely convinced that Martin wasn’t fixated on this solely because he found the thought of Jon’s friendship with an attractive young woman alarming, but he indulged the possibility for a moment.

“Oh yeah? Care to share your theory, detective?”

They had turned onto an otherwise empty alley, illuminated by only one lamp, frosted over and dull in the chill. Tim rolled his shoulders and moved faster: they walked this way every day, it was by far the fastest way home, there was no need to be paranoid.

“I m-mean, I wouldn’t say I have a theory, I’m just curious, I… Tim?”

He slowed and then stopped in his tracks, light expression fading entirely from his face as Martin trailed off. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt not Watched as a person did in the Institute, but as a deer did, caught in torchlight. Every muscle in his body seemed to tighten and draw him up, tense as bowstrings.

When he chanced a quick look at Martin, he found him much the same, eyes just as wide and roving, breath coming as quick.

Nobody else was on the street. It was night, and that hadn’t seemed so unusual at first, but now it had become uncanny. There were none of the sounds of London at night; nothing but the thundering of their hearts. And then a low, wet snarl that had Tim jerking on the spot in bone-deep, instinctual terror. He wanted to flee, but his treacherous body wouldn’t move. It knew that to run was to draw pursuit.

To become prey.

From the shadows at the end of the alleyway emerged a figure. If Tim didn’t know better, he would have called it a man, shaggy-haired, dressed in a matted old fur coat, grinning broadly at them. But the grimacing mouth had far too many teeth to be a smile, or even to be human.

It stalked toward them - one step, two, fangs bared - and at a sign Tim’s body knew but his mind did not, the tension inside him reached an unbearable pitch and suddenly snapped.

Almost before he realised it he was _running_ , turning to bolt blindly into the night. It took him a good moments to think through panic, with a jolt of burning guilt, to look for Martin - beside him, thank god, albeit not quite as fast, but the difference between them made negligible by ice and confusion. And behind Martin, _too close_ , death itself: the wolfman.

It needed none of the dizzying effort it took them to run: full-pelt, grinning, it careened from one side of the alley to the other.

Tim caught only one terrifying glimpse before he grabbed hold of Martin’s upper sleeve and raced back into the streets, skittering left entirely at random. One more look back would be the end of them both, he was sure. So instead he just ran.

He knew what would most likely happen next, had heard it repeated in dozens of survivors’ stories, sketched out by witnesses to those less fortunate. Often the wolfman had blood on its muzzle or streaked through its fur; right now there was none, meaning they must be tonight’s first victims. It must be hungry. Tim couldn’t help but feel as though they had been deliberately chosen, staked out, and that now they were being chased for sport rather than the kill. The beast should have caught up to them in a matter of seconds, minutes if they were lucky, but instead it seemed always just _almost_ within arms’ reach, growling behind them or stamping audibly on ice, as though to make sure they knew it was still there.

 _Bad manners to play with your food_.

He didn’t know how long they ran, only that there was never anybody else. Every other soul in London seemed to have fled to the warmth and the safety of the indoors, leaving him and Martin alone, trapped in a maze with a monster.

At some point during the longest, most desperate sprint of Tim’s life, he realised he could no longer hear the wolf snapping at their heels - not over the roar of blood in his ears nor Martin’s panicked wheezing, anyway - and spun as best he could while still moving to look around for it.

Just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean it was gone. Still, they couldn’t physically run any further for the moment, and so they slowed their pace to a stumble, frantically trying to catch their breath and startling at the slightest movements of the breeze around them.

“Wh- wh-”

“Wolf,” Tim panted.

“I can _see that,_ but _why is it_ -”

Martin’s voice had risen to a squeak. Releasing his friend’s coat-sleeve from his white-knuckle grip, Tim gestured for quiet.

“Jon said it wasn’t real - didn’t see any of the hallmarks of th- you know -” Tim whispered, head throbbing as he tried to think through the thick haze of fear. “Maybe we weren’t getting any of the real statements on it, just, uh, incidentals? But - why not?”

In trying to figure out even the tiniest shred of what was happening to them, he had forgotten to be quite so thorough as he should be in checking their surroundings.

They backed almost directly into an alley that laughed cruelly at them.

This time, when Tim and Martin jumped and burst into a run, they broke apart: Tim flew one way, Martin the other, both knowing that they had no time to correct their course or to turn and see who it was that was now being hunted.

By all rights, by all logic of a sane world, Tim should have gone flying on the black ice, tripped over the uneven paving stones, broken his neck and been forced to wait, with his blood pooling beneath him, for the beast to finish him off. This was not a sane world, though: this was a world that was beginning to twist under the power of the fear of madness incarnate, a world where Tim’s terror of pursuit was feeding upon itself, and so he ran, and ran, and didn’t stop, for longer than should have been possible. He heard the growling, the footsteps, echoing from ahead and behind, from all sides, skidding away sharply whenever he did, until he no longer thought of trying to trick or outthink his pursuer. Only to escape. He was utterly lost on the dark streets, and didn’t care, so long as _lost_ did not mean _consumed_. There was running or there was death, so Tim’s feet beat on.

Eventually he was certain that he had either been chased into circles, or that the geography of the city was somehow changing, leading him through the same streets over and over again now matter where he turned. _That_ was the passageway that he and Martin turned into every day from the Institute toward their boarding house, where the wolf had first appeared. He was sure of it. Even as he felt as though he was hurtling into his doom, though, Tim couldn’t hesitate to race down the alley -

Only to stop dead at its end, where it turned into the wide main road, as if meeting a brick wall.

In the middle of the deserted road, he could finally see the wolfman clearly. It was even less human than it had at first appeared: perhaps it had once been a man, but now it was warped beyond all recognition, _sharpened_. From what should have been hands extended not even claws but knives; row upon row of razor-edged teeth lined a too-long, drooling jaw; its eyes flashed yellow, ravenous; and what Tim and every other witness had unthinkingly mistaken for fur revealed itself beneath the clear winter moonlight to be more like long, thin spines, jutting agonisingly through its very skin.

It didn’t turn toward Tim. Nor did it close in for the final kill toward its other victim, who was staggering backwards down the street in futile horror.

Instead, it crept menacingly toward where Martin must have fallen and pushed himself back up, to… to his satchel, lying forgotten amid the dirty slush. It fell forward onto its arms to lean close and, shoving its nose into the worn leather, inhaled deeply. Uncaring of how the material ripped, it tangled its dread claws in the bag, and a look of pure focus crossed its feral features as it stood and lifted its prize up close to its face to smell again.

There was no blood. But there was a satisfaction, a hum in the air that said, for now, that the hunt was satiated.

The beast turned and loped away, taking Martin’s satchel with it, and Tim felt the real world settle around them again like a familiar cloak, heard the faint city noises begin again in the distance.

He stepped unsteadily out from his alley, and met Martin’s eyes, mirroring his sweat-plastered, shocked expression.

“…fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Canon-typical Hunt content  
> \- Being chased by a dog-like / wolf-like creature  
> \- Mild body horror ("his fur was on the inside" vibes)


	12. Circumvent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have spent the past few days in a hell spiral (heh) writing a chapter of my thesis, and tomorrow I am going into a three day long exam. All my brain is able to comprehend is medieval monks, they're all I've spoken about for weeks. Wish me luck. I may die.
> 
> (Updates will continue :), I have the chapters pre-written and just need to press post,, other activity will be slower.)

Jon studiously ignored Melanie as he brushed past her in the indexes. She didn’t afford him the same courtesy.

“Jesus, you look rough.”

“Good morning to you too, Miss King.”

“I bet you haven’t had a _good_ morning in your life, Sims.”

He sighed.

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Yeah, I deduced that.”

There was no anger in her voice, but her temper was running hot today, he could feel it. She had learned to compensate for the _still open_ wound in her leg, and it was well-hidden now beneath the many layers that draped it. Only the steady, hateful drone of violence in her blood informed him of its presence.

He had dreamed restlessly that night, as he always did. This time it had been the victims of statements he had consumed, locked in their horrors, staring plaintively at the new monster in the corner of the worst moments of their lives as he watched hungrily and did nothing to save them. Sasha had been among them. She had not been able to speak to him, but she had looked back with something like understanding, and that had been _worse_. Painful in a more drawn-out, aching fashion than the jagged, sickening terror of his grandmother’s memories of death.

Magnus had been particularly cryptic that morning, and irritated with him.

 _“I believe you know what you have to do, don’t you?”_ he had asked, and Jon had stumbled for a moment over the nature of the question before he had been able to answer.

_“I - yes, sir, I do.”_

_“And?”_

_“I don’t know_ **_how_ ** _\- the information isn’t here, or if it is I’m not looking at it correctly, but I don’t know how much time there is left to -”_

 _“Jonathan. You have_ **_not_ ** _been dealing well with distractions, I see. How disappointing.”_

Melanie was blocking his way, Jon realised, coming out of his thoughts by scrubbing a hand over his face. If she was trying to start a fight he would have to tread carefully to avoid it: the Slaughter was hindered somewhat in the Ceaseless Watcher’s place of power, but Melanie was probably already physically strong enough to hurt Jon fairly badly before it had infected her, and he didn’t feel like fighting for his life over annoying her slightly. He raised his eyebrows, asking what it was she wanted.

Instead of lashing out, she held the envelope in her hand up to him.

“Georgie asked me to give you this. She was acting sort of weird about it, so it might be… important.”

He took it with knitted brows, fingers itching to open it right there and then. Why wouldn’t Georgie simply hand him such a thing herself?

“Important how? Is she alright?”

“I think so? She didn’t seem upset or scared.” Melanie shrugged, failing to look convincingly unconcerned. “She needed to get to work, that’s why she gave it to me. There wasn’t anything obviously wrong.”

“Hm.”

The only thoughts that Beholding granted him, when Jon cast about as subtly as he could for _something wrong_ , were of Martin and Tim. They were a little late, actually, he believed - although the grandfather clock stated confidently that it was three in the afternoon and was of no help.

“Have you se-”

“Jon!”

Really, soon someone was bound to complain to Mister Magnus about people running down the staircase to the archives and yelling for him. Jon and Melanie hurried into the main part of the department just in time to see Martin and Tim crashing through the doorway, both noticeably on edge and marked with a scent of drying blood and adrenaline that Jon recognised as _the Hunt_. Beside him, Melanie was frowning at them, clearly seeing it too.

“Jon,” greeted Martin, clearly relieved to see him - while Tim, lit up with manic energy, scrabbled through the mound of papers on his desk.

“Wolfman!” he proclaimed, grabbing at a piece of scrap upon which someone had scribbled a doodle of a hunched, hulking figure, and displaying it to the others.

Under usual circumstances, Jon would have scoffed instantly at the mention of a mythical beast like that, as though it was credible. Not today, though. Today, Martin was still looking at him like he had truly believed Jon might have been in real danger. He had told them the truth of the Dread Powers, and been believed; the least he could do was to believe them in turn, when both of them reeked so strongly of the chase that he was amazed that they were standing before him instead of trapped inside its domain, hurtling through an endless woods.

“…What happened?”

*

Sasha was the first of them to manage to produce a theory, once both Tim and Martin had told their story and assured the others quite firmly that they were fine, they had kept a watch that night and hadn’t been pursued on their way to the Institute that morning, and that other than when Martin had wrenched his ankle falling they were unhurt. It hadn’t bitten or scratched them, only stolen from them.

That wasn’t _right_ , it couldn’t be.

“…Paranoid delusion?” she suggested, voice serious, deep in thought.

When Tim began to object, she shook her head, cutting him off.

“Not yours, sorry - the fear of it. Jon, you said, as the Spiral grows stronger it brings other Entities into our world alongside it. The passage into the Buried was one, and logically I can only imagine it creates similar routes into the Vast. What if it’s also bringing monsters to torment its victims, even if they’re aligned otherwise? The ‘wolfman’ could be the manifestation of an irrational belief that one is being hunted, despite assurances otherwise, made real.”

That certainly fit with the pattern of all that had been happening, but it didn’t feel right; before Jon could say so, Melanie jumped in. 

“It doesn’t look like madness to me. There’s just… predation, breathlessness, and the horrid visceral pink of gore. Reckon it should have tried to eat you lads for it to look like that.”

Jon frowned - it sounded like she was talking about Flesh. He was familiar, of course, with Smirke’s final theory of a fourteenth fear, but Magnus despised it. Thirteen was the way that they had always mapped things, it was correct. An auspicious, odd number, none of the Entities ever able to be fully balanced because one would always be vying for the top; that was what made sense. Besides, the concept that fears could manifest over time contravened all the grand notions of the human condition that Smirke’s early followers had conjectured on. He had been taught not to believe in the Flesh.

“I don’t think it was the Spiral either,” agreed Tim, confident in his own area of expertise. “That’s not a bad theory, Sasha, and it might explain how the wolfman-”

“-Hunter,” Jon corrected, unable to stop himself, exasperated. “Please, ‘wolfman’ sounds so juvenile.”

“-how the _Hunter_ got so powerful,” Tim carried on, unphased. “That’s not the point, though. The point is that it’s _targeting the Magnus Institute._ I swear, I’ve been researching this for months, and I’m sure of it, I just didn’t put it together - look, look at these,”

He pushed several reports at them: one or two were the sort that people filed alongside a statement, although with no written account attached, some were letters of concern, and others were no more than notes that Tim or a secretary had scrabbled down. Tim jabbed his finger down on one of them, grimly triumphant.

“This, _here_ , Josephine Graham on a ‘dog’ that chased her out of the pub - she used to work for the library. And here, Mister Barron, on a creature that injured his leg down by the bridge, just a week after he’d given a statement to you, Jon. This one, too: Martha Kiernan said it’d killed her nephew, and he was a linkboy for this street. There must be a thousand other connections, as well, these are just the most recent and obvious. But why’s it hanging around like that instead of just attacking?”

Jon was staring, struck dumb, feeling sick, at the evidence before him. _True, true, true_ , crowed the Eye. But he had Seen none of it. As he overexerted himself, tried to press further into Beholding, he found that he Knew something else as surely as if he’d been born knowing it.

“…Jon?”

All the others were looking at him, expecting answers that he didn’t have. He shook his head slowly in dismay.

“It’s not the Institute,” he breathed. “It’s _me_ . Miss Graham was following up my research on Sumerian demons - I spoke to Mister Barron - and the linkboy, I remember him, he was tired and bumped into me as I was going home. They all came into contact with me, and Martin, it went after your bag with what I’d written inside. It was trying to _catch my scent_. How could I not have realised, that’s it’s been - it’s been going on for _months_ , I should have been able to tell, to find the real statements-!”

“Boss.” Tim said, firm. “No. That’s what I’m saying: there haven’t been _any_ real statements. Nothing that reached us, anyway. You and Magnus have been so fixated on the Spiral that I’m surprised you even let me look into any of this at all, to be honest.”

Martin had been biting on his nails as he listened silently, but he stopped now, straightening up to say,

“Mister Magnus - could he be intervening? To, I don’t know, to… hide them from you, and make sure you stay focused on the Spiral? Would he do that?”

Sasha seemed to seize on that. Either because she could see the white-hot sparks of fear in the air around him at the mention of his master, or merely because of something in his face, Melanie made a gesture that had Sasha’s words dying in his throats. He tugged nervously on his hair.

“I - I have more, on th-the Hunt - I’d forgotten, with the rising power of the Twisting Deceit, but I have accounts, I can -”

He fled into his office, barely bothering to disguise it. The slam of the heavy door behind him muted his assistants’ rising, chattering debate as it rose in pitch. Jon darted feverishly toward his own bookshelf to search for what little had ever been properly written on the topic of such a base, animal terror - only to realise, as he did, that he was still holding Georgie’s letter in his hand.

By all rights he should have discarded it, come back to it later. Two of his assistants had already been targeted by the Hunter, though, and he couldn’t help but worry for Georgie. She cared for the Admiral, who surely must reek of Jon. And Melanie had said the letter could be important. He knew if he ignored a warning from Georgie then she would never forgive him - because it _felt_ like a warning; there was a strange malice, an anticipation radiating from the paper.

Another sign of weakness, probably, of avoiding the crisis at hand; but Jon chose to perch for a moment against the edge of his desk and tear open the envelope, hoping beyond hope that his friend was alright, that she had only some tedious matter for him.

 _My dearest Jon_ , began the letter. _I only pray that you can forgive me._

_When I was sixteen I heard a dead woman speak._

He stiffened, grip almost tight enough to tear at Georgie’s slender, precise penmanship, body caught in a rictus as his eyes, helpless to do anything but feed his patron, scanned over the pages. For a moment he tried to fight it. But Jon Knew that resistance had never, would never, come to anything; his small strength meant nothing against all-consuming fear.

So he kept reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .....apologies for the deception Jon?


	13. Dead Woman Walking

_My dearest Jon_ ,

_I only pray that you can forgive me._

_When I was sixteen I heard a dead woman speak._

_I intend to stop the predator in its tracks. I doubt that the scattered witnesses that are your sources will be able to tell you as much, but I have observed the creature’s comings and goings for some months now, and believe that I can draw it down to the river, where I have means to deal with it._

_I know how to do it, but I also know that you will likely not allow me to do so; as Melanie has been increasingly distracted ever since her injury, an attempt of yours to intrude is the only true obstacle I am able to anticipate. Truly, Jon, I_ _am_ _sorry, but I thought it wise to take measures to prevent that. All your archival assistants agree that it is quite impossible for you to cease reading any tale of a supernatural encounter, once you have begun. To that end I can offer you my story, and a plea for you to leave my plans intact._

 _My family had been undertakers for generations. We cared for the dead, and the dead cared for us. I think that can give a person an unusual sort of attitude to the whole ordeal, corpses and the afterlife and all of that. Seeing it so close acclimatises you, and I don’t think I was ever_ _afraid_ _of such things, as an ordinary person might be. A little unnerved by bodies, perhaps - but I find it difficult to remember now. You don’t notice reactions like that until you no longer have them. It’s so hard trying to recall a feeling once it’s gone, like trying to close your hand around smoke. But I do think I was always more curious than afraid._

_I didn’t start with me or my family, not really. Until I met you and Melanie I used to think of it as some horrible disease, something that another victim had already contracted and which I encountered by chance. Now, I’m not so sure._

_My father used to let researchers from the Liverpool Royal Hospital perform their dissections upon some of the cadavers that came into our hands. Not like a common resurrectionist, you must understand: there wasn’t any dirtying our hands with common grave-robbing on behalf of clumsy, trainee sawbones. These were proper men of science, and it was all for the benefit of knowledge, even if it was less than legal. I’ll admit that the operation wasn’t without fault - for the most part the bodies were those that no one claimed, but I knew that some were just those unfortunates whose families couldn’t afford the cost of a burial, or that we thought no one would come looking for. Perhaps if we’d had a little more thought for God we’d have felt guilt about that but, well, they were already dead, and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference, what happened to a body after the spark of life was gone._

_I was always so very interested in the scientists, making a nuisance of myself to them as they went about their work. I wanted just as they did, to understand anatomy, and I was educated well enough even as a teenager - but these scholars made me so aware of my standing in the world that it hurt. We were better-off than most around us, we had our trade, but they knew they were of a higher class and they acted like it; you could hear it in their voices, Jon, the same accent as you and your Mister Magnus. It made me feel foolish, self-conscious in their presence. That was more shame than fear, though I recognise pieces of your Watcher in it now. Isn’t it odd how they mix? I hated the way they looked at me. I don’t much like the way you sometimes stare so hungrily at me, either, Jon, but I don’t believe you can help it, and I notice the way you force yourself to look away._

_Feeling as though I was lesser only made me more determined to meet them and understand their work, though. I’m sure you can understand that impulse. So when I overheard one of the apprentices saying that the researchers had been cooped up for more than thirty hours in their laboratory, I knew almost at once that I would find my way inside and discover why. My father told them all not to, of course, but he didn’t know that I was listening; he didn’t know that I could hear one of the lads describing the scene. “_ They were just… sitting there _,”, he kept saying, in this tone like he had seen a ghost._

_It wasn’t difficult to sneak past my family bickering in the shop front - I was barely more than a child, after all, it was the dead of night, and they had no reason to suspect that I would be anywhere but bed. I suspect that they were worrying over what to do with their fine and well-paying men of science: they could hardly admit to the police that we had been letting them carry on illegal dissections in the basements we gave them the run of for their experiments, but neither could they wait for the scientists’ disappearance to be noted and let that trail lead back to us. I’ve never known how they solved that problem, actually. I don’t much care._

_The men in the cellar were all lying motionless on the floor. Not like they were sleeping, or posed: even just from the entrance I could see that most lay at strange, uncomfortable angles, like discarded, broken dolls. They seemed… grey, somehow, and they had that blankness to their expressions that people like to call ‘peace’ on the dead, with their eyes all unfocused and glassy. I was sure they were alive, however, for their chests moved slowly up and down. By their breathing you would have thought them completely, blissfully relaxed._

_The only figures not collapsed upon the floor were sat up on the examination tables: a woman and her young son, naked as the day they were born, with white sheets pooled around their middles._

_I recognised the woman instantly. How could I not? I’d helped to wash and clean her cold form just the day before. They had been homeless, frozen to death by the look of them, poor creatures._

_At first I thought it must have been some ghoulish prank. They did that, sometimes, the scientists or apprentices: propped up a body like it was living and carried on one-sided conversations with them. The men on the floor had inhaled some gas and fallen limp, and left their nasty joke up on the slab; that must have been what happened, I decided. There was no mistaking the corpses for anything other than dead, after all. Blue lips, limbs stiff with rigour mortis, no hint of pulse or warmth._

_But they were_ _moving_ _. I tried to tell myself that they couldn’t be - a trick of the light, that was all, that the woman’s eyes had seemed to sweep across the room and focus on me when I slipped through the door, and my mind making things up, that they seemed to be breathing, too. _

_Then the boy raised his hands and waved to me. Just as casual as if we had been acquaintances forever, just waved. His face was vacant and empty, but he moved so easily: there was none of the stiffness in him that there should have been._

_I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I was utterly petrified, my muscles locked in place, and now I knew it was no illusion when the dead woman’s eyes locked onto mine and slowly, surely, she got to her feet. When the sheet fell away I could see the open gash where they’d started cutting into her belly - she was too far gone for it to even bleed. She picked her way calmly across the men sprawled on the floor, toward me, closer and closer until there was scarcely an inch between us. I could feel the coolness of her skin, smell her starting to rot, see her lips beginning to form words._

_I threw my hands over my ears like a child. I don’t know where I got the desperate courage to move from: I remember trembling, tears brimming over before I screwed my eyes shut tight so that I didn’t have to watch her leaning toward me. It didn’t stop her, though. She put her icy hands over mind - I’ll never forget the sensation, the skin-crawling wrongness of dead flesh_ _moving_ _\- and I heard her say,_

"The moment you die will feel exactly like this one."

_There are no words for me to describe the fullness of understanding that she gave me. I knew, then, that there is no splendid or wretched eternal life to come, not even a lonely eternity to spend in the grave. I knew the present is already dead, and the future is the same; that there is no difference between the me that will breathe my last and the me stood in the cellar, the me that writes this letter. For even the world will end; the future is passing, has passed, and it has all already ended._

_I felt everything at once in my terror, ecstatic jubilation as well as deep despair, my feelings blazing up to consume me in the realisation of the smallness, the pointlessness of all existence. Not only human existence, but any existence at all, any accidental speck of life. My emotions crested and burned away, and then_ ~~_the_ ~~ ~~_I_ ~~ _f ~~ound m~~ _ ~~_darkn_ ~~

_What I experienced then, where I went, is not for you to know. Even as I feel my pen move without my consent, even as something dread and powerful makes me desire greatly to tell you, I refuse. Know that, Jon, and as a friend do not ask me. Instead I will only warn you to keep a watch for Olly._

_When I woke up, I was lying in my bed, and I had been there for two months. My siblings and my mother were there, and they were weeping and trying to stop me, but I ignored them. Eventually I managed to numbly trip my way down to the cellar. It was empty. Like I said, I didn’t learn what happened, not in full, so I don’t know how they got rid of the scientists, or the dead woman and her dead son. One of the apprentices mentioned later that a bunch of gravediggers had come in the night and done it. I didn’t care._

_I_ _couldn’t_ _care. For almost a year, I felt nothing at all, until gradually, gradually, my emotions began to return to me. By the time I decided I couldn’t stand my family’s pitying softness any longer and set off to London, I was able to feel again, more or less, enough to live a normal life. I was at least able to_ _act_ _something close to normal, though I don’t believe I’ll ever be the person I was before. For not everything returned to me._

_Ever since I heard those awful words, I have not felt afraid. Fear is simply a sensation that I no longer experience. I am no idiot, I understand risk and how to avoid it, but the emotional response is gone._

_I’ve never been able to figure out whether it was cauterised or stolen._

_I have done plenty of research, though: into monsters, into dead things come alive, into fear. Melanie and I both like to refer to ‘spirits’, for ease, but we both know that there is more to this world than merely ghosts. The wolf-creature that has been haunting Millbank is one such example. It_ _has_ _killed, and it_ _will_ _do so again, and I refuse to allow that to happen._

_Please, do not fret over this as though I am wandering unawares into its teeth. I have the weapons I need against it and I have a plan to rid the world of its poison._

_Jon, again, please accept my deepest and most heartfelt apologies for the deception, but minimising the risk that you would interfere consumed a great deal of that planning. You are a rather ubiquitous figure in local tales of the paranormal, you know. I’ve asked my beloved Melanie not to read this, and I trust that, out of affection for me, she won’t._

_This needs to be done. Still, in private I can admit that there is a strange thrill of power in my soul at the thought of stopping such a powerful hunter in its tracks, in bringing it to its end. I wonder if this is how you feel when you feed your patron._

_If I am not able to return, please give Melanie my love._

_Miss Georgina Barker._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Discussion of corpses: undertaking, graverobbing, dissections  
> \- Minor classism and misogyny


	14. Carnage, Part I

Melanie was trying _so hard_ to stay patient as the others threw theories and plans of actions back and forth. She had stopped being able to listen or contribute a few minutes ago, but she was _trying_. All she could do was drum her fingers on the desk, beating the rhythm of the agitation stirring in her blood into the wood.

Something was wrong. If she ignored it any longer she was sure that she would snap.

Sasha trailed off mid-sentence as Melanie stood abruptly, and she had to quash the urge to bark _don’t look at me like that_ . Those impulses still shocked her, appearing in her mind with such violence: Sasha was her _friend_ , her housemate, Melanie liked the long, studious conversations they shared, liked Sasha’s carefully considered thoughts on deeply ridiculous topics. What was wrong with her? How could she possibly be so livid at someone she got along with so well, who had done nothing wrong?

“What’s Jon _doing_ in there?” she asked sharply, failing to push down the rising aggravation and instead redirecting it. Her cloudy eyes might not be able to see his office door entirely clearly from across the room, but even she could tell that it was still firmly shut.

“Maybe someone should check on him?” said Martin worriedly. Tim shrugged.

“I’m sure he’s just… wait, is he talking?”

They listened for a moment, and - Tim was right, Jon was speaking aloud. His voice sounded strangely strangled, as though he was forcing the words out through gritted teeth.

But Melanie didn’t pay attention to that. Instead, she saw red, unable to stop herself from marching over to barge into Jon’s office despite the instant objections of his assistants. They were in crisis, there was a entire extra monster other than that which he had already been fretting over stalking the streets after him, specifically, and all he could think to do was read another damn statement - 

Jon didn’t move or respond as the door opened. He was leaning against his desk, every part of his body rigid, excepting only the mouth that formed words and the eyes that scanned over the words he was reading, lashes wet with frustrated tears he couldn’t blink to shed. To Melanie’s eyes he was drenched in the luminous green of his patron, and from his mouth emerged a column of chalky smoke, the most common of the spirits that Melanie saw, the foreboding shade of inevitable death.

Melanie stopped in her tracks, anger fading in confusion.

“Jon?”

“ _…no mistaking the corpses for anything other than dead, after all. Blue lips, limbs stiff with rigour mortis, no hint of pulse or warmth, but…”_

“Jon!”

He didn’t respond when she shook his shoulder, or to the others’ increasingly alarmed attempts to rouse him.

“What’s happening to him? Why won’t he stop?”

“Th-the statement,” Martin stammered, unable to tear his eyes away from Jon’s stiff form, the slight tremor in his hands. “I wasn’t joking, he can’t stop, once he’s…”

As he spoke, Sasha picked up a page that Jon must already have read and discarded and cast her eyes over it quickly, knowing without having to be told that there was no way that he would allow them to take the sheet he was currently reading from. The rounded, looping handwriting on it was familiar, Melanie realised, pulse thudding. It was Georgie’s handwriting.

Sasha glanced nervously up to her, not quite able to articulate what she had read, and worry settled as fury like burning embers in the pit of Melanie’s stomach.

“What?!”

“It’s Georgie,” Sasha admitted, consternation in every line of her face. “She says… that she’s going after the Hunter, and she’s making sure that Jon can’t follow her.”

Sasha didn’t resist when Melanie snatched the letter out of her hand, barely able to make out the words through her sudden, anxious rage. Behind them, Jon continued to speak in a constant, clear rhythm.

 _I intend to stop the predator in its tracks_ \- Georgie had written, steady and cool.

_Melanie has been increasingly distracted -_

_An attempt of yours to intrude is the only true obstacle I am able to anticipate -_

She was stepping back before she knew what she was doing, face twisted into a snarl, hand finding the hilt of the dagger that she now always kept on her person.

“Melanie, don’t-”

Tim’s hand was batted away before it could touch her forearm. He should think himself lucky she didn’t cut it off.

Outraged, terrified anger was boiling over in her mind, obliterating any other thoughts - drowning out, in particular, the rational voice in her brain screaming that her leg felt as though it was on fire, that the phantom musket-ball was twisting sadistically, unnaturally beneath her skin - as she turned and began to run.

Georgie was her best friend, her soulmate, her lover. If Melanie couldn’t protect her, then what use was she?

The river, Georgie had said; Melanie would find her at the river. And she would kill every last person along the banks if they stood in her way.

*

_“...I can admit that there is a strange thrill of power in my soul at the thought of stopping such a powerful hunter in its tracks, in bringing it to its end._

_“If I am not able to return, please give Melanie my love: Miss Georgina Barker.”_

Jon was shaking more and more severely as the statement neared its end. When the last words left his lips and the intense, hungry gaze of the Ceaseless Watcher evaporated from the room, leaving it in simple candlelight again, he would have collapsed if not for Martin’s arm around his shoulders, quickly pulling him into a hug.

“G-Georgie,” he stammered, one hand twisted tight in Martin’s waistcoat to hold himself up, face twisted in horror. “She’s - how much did you hear?”

“Something about a talking corpse,” said Tim, steeling himself. “And then she and Melanie set off after the wolfman.”

“Melanie? Why?!”

Jon stumbled as he tried to stand alone.

“Melanie seemed furious,” Sasha explained. “I don’t know why, exactly - she was holding her knife, and she ran off when she read the letter.”

“No, no, it’s the,” Jon swallowed hard, and with visible effort pulled himself free of Martin’s protective grip. “The Slaughter, she’s not safe, it’ll consume her if she tries to use that power. Georgie’s thrown herself toward the Hunter, but at least she has the - those damn flowers, aconite, _wolfsbane_. Whatever weapon she’s made, I’d bet it has something to do with that.”

He took a few cautious steps toward the door; clumsy, but steady enough to walk, that would have to do.

“What are you doing?!”

“We can’t just leave them. Georgie has a plan, but Melanie - she can’t give herself over to the Slaughter, she won’t be able to come back.”

Tim, at least, seemed to understand Jon’s urgency; while Martin and Sasha hesitated, he wasted no time in rushing out of the archives, only grabbing a pocket knife from his desk drawer on the way out.

Good. They were going to need it.

*

It was still early enough in the day that the bridge was sleepy, if not totally abandoned. Georgie had paid her penny at the booth, quietly warned the unimpressed toll collector that she had heard of dangerous wild animal attacks that he ought to beware of - _why would I need to worry more than her_ , she could see him thinking, but she had done her best by warning him - and walked calmly over to the railings to watch the city go about its morning.

Usually the creature would be sleeping at this hour; if it did sleep, that was. It would be dormant, anyways, since it only stalked its prey at night. But Georgie had no intention of meeting it on its own terms. She had left wolfsbane - dried _and_ fresh, best not to risk that one type might be more effective than the other - all along the bank that she had observed it returning to at the end of each hunt. That had seemed the most reliable method of dealing with a werewolf, of all those available: she had done her reading, but she could not expect to get close enough to drive a nail through the beast’s hands, nor discover its given name, nor attempt to invoke Saint Hubert against it (though she had found a necklace with the holy man’s portrait to wear; better safe than sorry). If it removed its skin while it slept, she had noy yet been able to find and burn the thing.

 _Silver_ bullets had seemed excessive. If the antidote to lycanthropy was a property of silver in general, then she had that: silver coins sewn into the fingers of her gloves, silver buttons glinting on her plain work dress. If, as she suspected, the only remedy was brute force, then ordinary bullets would do. The fact that she had thoroughly coated each in wolfsbane tincture should also help.

Whatever eventuality might come, she was prepared for it. If the creature killed her, she was prepared for that, and felt nothing about it except regret for the time that she would lose with Melanie. They had been happy, and Melanie would at least be able to understand the reason for the betrayal, the urge to rid the world of monsters, but Georgie still felt a pang of guilt.

Death, on the other hand, could hold no horrors. She already knew the feeling of her final moment.

For almost two hours she stood unobtrusively at the edge of Vauxhall Bridge, surveying the Thames, and the handful of mudlarks and squabbling seabirds working along its verges. Both humans and wildlife seemed to be avoiding one particular bend in the river, she noticed, where the water twisted sharply and whatever was up on the bank would be largely concealed from view. That could be for any number of reasons, of course: some bloated corpse washed up and stinking, maybe, or some dangerous scrap too sharp to bother retrieving, or some drunk harassing passersby.

But then there was a yowl like an injured stray, indistinct at such a distance, which abruptly cut short with a squelch of breaking flesh. Any nearby scavengers seemed to sense to quickly make themselves scarce, and Georgie knew for certain that what she pursued was there.

Keeping her eyes focused on the spot from which the noise had emanated, she strolled down and went to stand by the water’s edge, half in the shadow of the bridge. A perfect victim, an easy target down here all alone, where no one would notice as it dragged her into the gloom. And a victim that had given Jon a hug just the day before, too, arms wrapped tight around his startled, rigid shoulders, barely resisting the urge to tease him about how he never seemed to bristle like a spooked cat when _Martin_ touched him.

She made sure to look as though she had cast her eyes downwards, playing with the ring on her left forefinger. Georgie had given herself an entire cover story, a tale of a spurned lover planning to throw her token into the river (though she wouldn’t actually waste the ring; its bezel was filled with tincture too), but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that her bonnet hid the way she was watching for it, made her seem to have turned her unguarded back toward it. She was hoping that the beast would take that as an invitation to attack.

It did.

Sticking to the walls, the hulking shape emerged slowly from the turn in the river, right at the edge of Georgie’s vision, and began to lope in her direction. She repressed the urge to turn her head, and, casual as she could, brushed her fingers against the handle of the pistol hidden at her belt.

But the beast was no ordinary animal, and it advanced, more silently, more quickly, than should have been possible. Even braced for its strike, she had no more than a second’s warning before its claws were arching through the air at her. Georgie’s heart jumped and she dodged gracelessly, a barely-controlled dive to the ground away from razor-edged death. Her slipped caught and fell off, and she ignored it, rolling away with her blood pumping loud in her ears. The gun in her hand might as well have been a brick for all she was able to use it, but she managed to lash out anyway, smacking the barrel against a too-hard skull and driving it back a few paces.

Georgie didn’t delude herself that she was strong enough to hurt this monster with only such an inelegant blow. It was toying with her, she knew that, trying to push her into the dark; an attempt to scare her, probably. _That_ wouldn’t work. She felt nothing but frustration and determination. But it was moving too fast for her to aim.

As she stumbled up to her feet and backwards, it watched her hungrily. Red-tinged slobber drooled from its mouth, its too-sharp fur thick and matted with old gore. Its eyes glinted the hot white of a wolf’s eyeshine, reflecting nothing but its own voracious appetite - and then, as it leered at the flowers in her hair, the same flowers that she had stashed even under this very bridge, they flashed with _recognition._

Its voice rang in her ears like the grating of metal upon metal, seeming to catch and snag against its unnatural rows of teeth, scraping out of a throat that was no longer meant for speaking.

“So you’re the bitch who’s left this blight sprouting off the hidden places,” it snarled, hatred creeping into its face beside the thrill of the hunt. “You’re gonna regret that.”

In deep, animal instinct, Georgie shuddered involuntarily at the sound - but she still wasn’t afraid.

She raised her gun and shot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- The Hunt, the Slaughter, and the End  
> \- Melanie's Slaughter-infected mind and its desire to hurt her friends  
> \- Georgie's apathetic attitude to her own death (verging on suidical ideation)  
> \- Physical violence from a wolf / dog creature  
> \- Gun violence
> 
> I feed on comments and I will surely perish without them <3


	15. Carnage, Part II

The bullet went far over the creature’s head as the pistol kicked in her hand, erupting a plume of black smoke.

Georgie had bought the best gun that she could afford, but that had still been astonishingly old and cheap, and no amount of alarming her fellow boarders by shooting at milk bottles out behind the lodging house had been sufficient to prepare her for the reality of attempting to hit a moving werewolf.

The beast just laughed, spitting drool toward her, and started to advance again. It knew her game, now. Georgie cursed and tripped back, trying to give herself enough space to shoot again, fingers blundering on the chambers. At this distance she could see the shifting lines of hard muscles that moved beneath its skin, smell the vile stench of squalid fur and raw meat - transfixed on such a spectacle, lost in the murky dark beneath the bridge, she tripped on a discarded piece of mouldering canvas and fell. Its eyes lit up as it lunged after her.

On nothing more than instinct, she shot again, this time grazing it along the arm - or perhaps the foreleg?

The pain was enough for it to halt in its tracks with a yelp of surprise, so that it didn’t quite manage to leap onto her - but it only continued to laugh, seemingly delighted by the vivid streak of red, and to stalk easily toward where Georgie was scrambling backwards through the mud.

Twice was ample practice. She knew how to compensate for the weapon and the creature’s movements now, enough at least to aim for the gigantic body directly before her. Unlike most victims, she did not, could not, flinch away when it ran at her. This time, when she shot, she caught it square in the chest.

The beast made no move to avoid the bullet, though, and with a sinking disappointment she understood instantly why not; it only jerked as it was hit, the bullet caught upon its thick, sharp fur and lodged within the meat of its torso, penetrating only a few inches. At point blank range it should have been dead - but it knew she would presume that, and it used the opportunity to pounce on her as she screamed in shock.

That didn’t matter, though. None of that mattered, it wasn’t the point. As it seized her and dragged her off her feet, ignoring all her flailing and kicking and yelling, Georgie didn’t (couldn’t) despair. She didn’t need the bullets to pierce its body through, only to cut it sufficiently for the poison to enter its blood; she didn’t need to win this fight, or even to survive it, only for the beast to lose. If she could fend off the creature for a few moments, it would be paralysed by the aconite tincture in which she had soaked her shot, and then it would be hers to drown, to surrender to death in the river.

The silver along her body was doing nothing to protect her. Its claws gouged deep into her arms, gnashing jaws threateningly close too her neck, and Georgie began to pray that if she did die before the beast then whoever found its incapacitated form would have the good sense to destroy the body.

It was getting angrier, crueller. Monsters fed on fear, Jon had said, and she had none to give it; unsatisfied with her lack of terror, it swiped its claws up the side of her face.

And something else hurtled toward her cry.

Barely a second later, the Hunter was thrown off her, flung forward onto its face by the force of another creature crashing into it from out in the light, shrieking in unrestrained fury.

Georgie’s ears rung as she pushed herself away shakily, trying to make out what was happening in the dim light, through the overwhelming pain. It was only the sounds of her rescuer’s yells as she fought that gave her identity away: it was _Melanie_ , Georgie realised, pulling herself up by the bridge’s struts.

She was almost unrecognisable. That was Melanie’s dress, yes, Melanie’s half-dishevelled plaits whipping around her as she slashed at the beast, Melanie’s pale eyes, even Melanie’s elegant dagger glinting in her hand. But the expression on her face was alien. Her features were twisted in a grotesque mask of all-consuming wrath, _grinning_ murderously through it. Every ounce of anger that had ever driven Melanie was present in her movements, as smooth and sure as a dance, action effortless with the force of her fury. Georgie knew that anger, righteous and pure and defiant, she _loved_ it - but this was something far darker. It was brutal, it was beautiful.

Georgie could do nothing but stare for a brief, horrible moment as Melanie swiped at the monster, opening lines of crimson along its sharp, powerful body. The Hunter fought back, more and more desperately, clearly hurt now, really hurt in a way that Georgie never could have hoped to injure it. The beast hung back, still cunning, trying to bait Melanie toward its jaws. Melanie, who - though she kept it as close a secret as possible - was half blind, her vision obstructed by the spirits, by whatever had given them their second sight, their strange colour. Without the advantage of surprise, even with whatever savage power was driving her now, Melanie was vulnerable in the gloom. When she cut forward, she did so imprecisely, giving it enough space to veer away and lunge again.

“Further left!” Georgie shouted, without thinking.

Melanie’s head snapped toward her, with that same entwined rage and strange, savage joy in her gaze. When their eyes met, though, Melanie’s were not lost or hazy, as Georgie might have imagined, but somehow worse: focused, clear as they had ever been.

For a few suspended heartbeats Georgie wondered if Melanie would attack her now, if she had drawn the ire of whatever unnatural temper had infected her lover. She watched Melanie consider it, her white-knuckled grip shifting on the handle of her knife, then visibly shake off the impulse - and turn back to the beast as it tried to use that moment of distraction to strike.

Melanie’s dagger sunk deeply into the soft hollow its throat. It howled wetly, brokenly, clawing wildly toward her as she pulled back to stab again. The creature was still drooling, but not hungrily anymore; lumbering and impulsive, snapping in confusion, not even anywhere close to Melanie, and looking nothing more than rabid as it frothed at the mouth. _The wolfsbane taking effect_ , Georgie realised.

“It’s dying,” she tried to say, pressing her sleeve over the cuts on her face, forcing her leaden legs toward Melanie. “Mel - it’s _dying_ , you don’t have to -”

Georgie hadn’t been enough of a fool to try and touch her in such a state, but she had gotten close, scarcely a foot from her lover. Melanie wasn’t listening, wasn’t capable of listening to anything but the wild music screaming at her from that invisible wound anymore.

She rounded on Georgie; didn’t charge at her, but bared her teeth and almost, _almost_ , attacked, until the poisoned beast spasmed again and Melanie returned to hacking at it. The Hunter’s muscles had locked as it staggered to the ground. Its yellow eyes were rolling madly, and it was more broken flesh than whole, now.

Any other animal would be long dead.

“Here! They’re here-”

The shout took Georgie by surprise; she spun, gun raised, toward its source - but it was only a young man, flushed from clearly having run here, who threw his hands up in placation the instant he saw her pistol. _Tom?_ she thought, trying to put a name to the vaguely-remembered face, something like that, one of Jon’s assistants, the boy with the loud floral patterns and the truly terrible puns.

The other assistants followed close behind him, Jon rushing to the lead, all staring and horrified.

She and Melanie must be quite the sight by now. Georgie, half-mauled, steely with resolve; Melanie, drenched in blood, face a rictus of fury.

As Georgie slowly lowered her gun, Melanie seemed to realise something was wrong, and with one last vicious thrust of her knife into the gore that had once been the monster terrorising Millbank, she pushed herself up to face these interlopers.

Her expression twisted even further with derision as she looked over them; it became a seething sneer when it landed on Jon, specifically. Seeming resigned to this, he braced himself, and opened his mouth to speak.

Melanie didn’t let a word leave his mouth. As she threw herself toward him, Jon’s friends exploded into action, shouting for her to stop or for him to move, trying to slow down Melanie and drag Jon away.

Georgie’s gaze slid back to the monster lying butchered in a heap on the mud. It twitched, weakly, and her willpower rushed back into her with a vengeance. She had set out to give the monster to the End. If it wasn’t prepared to go naturally then she would have to force the matter. Mouth twisting in distaste, ignoring the sounds of desperate fighting and arguing from the others, Georgie took as firm a hold as she could manage of its grotesque bulk and began to haul it, step by burdensome step, toward the Thames to drown.

As it sank into the filthy tides, the water seemed to darken, to bubble with the power of _something_ horribly familiar: something that was nothing at all, the absence of a something, its inevitable death. But no one save Georgie was paying any attention to the river.

*

Melanie wasn’t going to tire. Pain or reason or weariness were never going to stop her, they wouldn’t even slow her down. Instead she would fight on until something killed her: she would turn all that her gaze touched to red, hoping viciously to infect her victims with the Slaughter even as she maimed them.

“It’s not you,” Jon tried to tell her, even as he stumbled precariously away from her blade. “Not _really_ you, Melanie, please,”

She managed to twist out of the straining grasp Tim had around her left arm, and sunk the knife into the ball of Jon’s shoulder. He screamed through gritted teeth and collapsed - he would like to say in an attempt to get away, but it was only reflex and pain - and grabbed at the injury with his other hand. The knife, by sheer fortune, stuck there as Martin wrapped his arms tight around Melanie from behind, utilising his height, for once, to pull her away. Tim dashed to stop Melanie from escaping again while Sasha pulled out the dagger and helped Jon up with his uninjured arm.

Even restrained, she didn’t stop fighting for a moment, slamming her head into Martin’s chin, kicking at Tim. Jon hesitated for a moment, breathing hard, overwhelmed, and tried to work out how to approach.

“Melanie,” came Georgie’s voice. Her expression was very serious, almost mournful; the Hunter was gone, disposed of, the only remnant traces of it the spiny ‘fur’ and blood on her clothes.

Melanie’s struggles didn’t cease, but they gentled, seeming less intended to fatally injure those holding her. She was listening.

“They’re not your enemies,” Georgie said, calmly, gravely. “They’re not going to hurt you.”

Jon cringed slightly: that, unfortunately, was a lie. There was no other choice, though. He took hold of the little pocket knife that Tim had passed to him, careful to try and turn the Eye away so Melanie wouldn’t sense the intent toward violence. This was the only chance they would have - even bleeding, relying on Sasha to stay upright, he had to take it.

“I’m so sorry, Melanie,” he mumbled, coming to kneel before her with Sasha’s help. Her body was still for just a moment as she stared toward Georgie.

Doing his best to ignore the complete impropriety, Jon gently pushed Melanie’s skirt up to her knee - and gagged at the sight he found there. The wound was worse: it was still open, still bleeding with the blood of the angry dead, but now it was _rotting_ too. The blood that oozed from it was dark and sluggish, the entire leg inflamed and pulsing with utter, total violence. 

None of the others could see anything, of course.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured again, and summoned the power of the Ceaseless Watcher to guide his actions as he quickly, very carefully positioned his blade. Sasha, smartly, took hold of the other leg.

The moment he cut, it was as though the spell over Melanie broke; she roared, lashing out in Martin and Tim’s arms, clawing at their fingers, trying to free her good leg from Sasha’s grip to kick Jon’s head in.

_“Get off me! Get away!”_

His makeshift scalpel met metal.

_“I’ll kill you, I swear to god-”_

An awful, gory squelch, and then -

The musket ball, no larger than a marble, fell into Jon’s palm. It looked so innocuous there, like nothing more than an ordinary drop of lead, but he could feel the loathing it spewed radiating into him after even a few seconds of contact. He couldn’t imagine surviving months with it inside his body.

Jon dropped it in disgust, and finally looked up to the others.

Melanie had gone limp, suddenly seeming barely conscious, all colour drained from her face. The effort that she had exerted fighting would be enough to do that, but her exhaustion was even deeper. Now the burden of constantly struggling against the power of the Slaughter had been lifted, and her mind was free to feel the pain of the injuries that both the Hunter and Jon’s impromptu surgery had given her: the agony was clear and terrible in a way that the anger had always seemed to burn across, before. Tears stung in her eyes - nothing more than pain, but they made Melanie realise, suddenly, that she had not been able to truly cry since the first moment that the musket-ball had touched her. She melted into astonished, exhausted sobs.

Georgie rushed over to hold her as Martin and Tim eased her to the ground, sensing, as they all did, that the danger had passed. Jon shook himself out of his reverie.

“Georgie’s bonnet,” he whispered, wincing as Sasha remembered to put pressure on his wound, and guided him to sit, slumped, across from Melanie. “The musket ball - ah - it’s not natural, a, agh, it’s a r-really bad idea to touch it.”

The look that Tim sent him said that he hadn’t needed to state that in quite so many words: they had all seen a bullet be pulled from Melanie’s seemingly-unhurt leg, after all.

No one bothered to pretend not to see Georgie cradling Melanie against the filth of the riverbank, kissing her damp cheek. The scene was painfully private, but what use did they have for shame?

The dagger lay forgotten at their feet.

“You’re not forgiven yet,” Melanie told her, clinging tight, voice thick.

“I know,” said Georgie. Neither woman let go.

For a moment, with Martin gingerly holding a bonnet covered in wolfsbane flowers, crumpled around an artefact of pure violence, the six of them did nothing more than stare around in shock and breathe.

It was Sasha that spoke up first, steady hands still stemming the flow of blood from Jon’s shoulder.

“That was Magnus,” she bit out, colder than Jon had ever heard her voice before. He twitched a little at the anger in it; but it was neither aimed at him, nor as frenzied as Melanie’s anger had been. “There’s no other explanation: that was _Magnus_. He was controlling which statements reached us - Tim, Jon, you said as much. He made sure you didn’t believe in the creature, and then he aimed it at you. He’s the reason Melanie and Georgie were almost killed, why you’re bleeding.”

 _I know_ , Jon didn’t say, the maelstrom of feelings in him too strong to do anything but gaze numbly at the dirty ground.

“Why?” she demanded, voice breaking.

“I don’t know,” Jon said hoarsely. It was a true, after a fashion: he _suspected_ , all sorts of horrifying, unspeakable things, but he didn’t Know, he was afraid to Know.

“What can we do?” asked Martin - not an expression of helplessness or disinterest, a genuine question, asked with a determined light in his eyes.

“I take it we can’t just confront the bastard,” came Melanie’s voice, a little muffled where she was leaning heavily on Georgie. The others startled to hear it; she was still fierce, of course, but there was something different about her voice now, something quieter, and she seemed so subdued.

But Melanie had never encountered Jonah Magnus in person; she didn’t understand the appalled glances they sent her at that suggestion, the way that Jon looked visibly sick at the concept.

His master was going to be furious with him. Jon had broken Mister Magnus’s cardinal rule again, intervened in the doings of three Powers for the sake of his friends. He had disobeyed without hesitation, knowingly put himself in danger and contravened every teaching of a man to whom he owed everything - a man who had also hidden a monster from him in the hope that it might attack. Jon didn’t understand. Nothing made sense anymore.

He hated the thought of drawing Magnus’s ire with a dread that seemed so deep a part of him as to be inscribed on the inside of his skull.

But Jon had been made into a servant of the Eye, and he hated ignorance more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- The Hunt, the Slaughter, and the End  
> \- (Cont.) Graphic violence and threat from a canine monster  
> \- Gun and knife violence  
> \- Poison  
> \- Blood, and an infected wound  
> \- Amateur surgery  
> \- Implied ableism (a character habitually concealing a disability)  
> \- Referenced abuse
> 
> Oof. Please don't pull something directly out of a puncture wound like Sasha does here - she gives off an air of competence, but she has no idea what she's doing, and it's lucky Jon's an avatar or he'd be in danger of bleeding to death.
> 
> Best lad in the next chapter :)


	16. Vigilance

This was the correct door, Jon was sure of it. No matter that he had been knocking incessantly for almost ten minutes with no answer: this was where he was meant to be, where he would find the answers he so desperately needed.

From within the darkened bookshop within there was a dull groan, followed by heavy footsteps thudding slowly across the floor.

Jon stopped knocking, staring hopefully up, and waited expectantly for the door to open.

It unlatched for the briefest of moments, allowing him to catch a glimpse of lank, dark hair, a pale, skinny figure, a scowl - and then, the moment that he was recognised, it slammed in his face.

He jumped a little - and immediately returned to hammering on the door, undeterred.

“Gerard! Gerard Keay! I need to speak to you!”

“ _Fuck off!"_ came a shout, from a body audibly slumped against the other side of the door, voice heavy with pain. “I fu- I _know_ who you are, you’re Jonah Magnus’s weird little homunculus, and I’m _not_ answering any questions for that man.”

“Please, it’s important,”

“Don’t your ears work?! Fuck off!”

“Mister Magnus doesn’t know I’m here!”

He didn’t know if Gerard Keay believed him, or if he was just surprised by the declaration, but either way, Jon took the opportunity to blurt out the truth, mouth dry.

“I don’t know how much time I have - we’re keeping him distracted, but I need to have this conversation _right now_ , I can’t waste -”

Jon heard a heaved sigh, and another muffled oath.

After a silent moment, the young man on the other side pushed himself to his feet, apparently with some difficulty, and tugged open the door which he had neglected to relock.

Looking at him face to face, Jon could sense the Eye’s firm hold on the older boy, apparently too strong for him to be able to resist curiosity. He regarded Jon warily.

“Jonathan, right?”

“Jon.” he corrected quickly. “Jon Sims.”

Gerard Keay’s gaze swept over him: the familiar sensation of being scrutinised by the Ceaseless Watcher, made unfamiliar by the new eyes from which it emanated.

“Well,” he said eventually, tiredly. “Unless you want to have this talk you’re so desperate for out on the doorstep, I suppose you’d better come in, Jon Sims.”

It wasn’t the first time Jon had ever been inside the shop, of course. The plain, dubiously-stained dark door had been well-known to him from the time that he had stood a head shorter than its unobtrusive brass plaque: _Pinhole Books - By Appointment Only._ Things were different now, though. Jon was a little taller, for one thing. For another, neither his master nor the witch that owned the shop were present, leaving the blackmailer’s apprentice and the witch’s son to talk alone. They had never done so before.

Contrary to the plaque, Jonah Magnus had never seemed to make an appointment, but Mary Keay had always expected him anyway. That was half the reason why Jon had chosen to come _here_ , the thought that she or her son might have some sort of clairvoyant ability with the Eye: Jon was no good with hypotheticals, only the truth, only cold, hard fact. And he was all too aware that Mister Magnus would be able to sense his own ward Looking at him, and would certainly be able to fend off any attempt to decipher something so complex as a secret motivation.

Gerard led him through the cramped shop floor, a labyrinth that Jon would never have been able to navigate by himself. Mary Keay seemed to prefer to hoard books than sell them, and they piled high across every inch of free space, spilling over their overcrowded shelves and colonising a great deal of the floor. Many lay open, while others had been shut so long that dust clung thickly to their unbroken spines. Despite his interest, though, Jon didn’t get much of a chance to look too hard at any of them; his guide walked haltingly, movements visibly tender, but never hesitated in his path. He was not led toward the dingy study that he had visited before, had expected - instead he was conducted through a narrow corridor into a set of small rooms that must have the Keays’ living space, directed at a pair of mismatched and thoroughly battered wooden chairs near the blackened fireplace. The witch’s son collapsed into one, angling his body gratefully toward the meagre heat of his guttering fire, and Jon hesitantly followed to sit across from him.

Gerard Keay was very tall and thin, his unwashed black hair hanging far longer than was proper down his back, his shirt open too low for company and his suspenders hanging around his waist, with only a loose tie, barely-knotted, covering his throat. He had prominent cheekbones, a sharp jaw, and guarded, cunning grey eyes. Though he knew he shouldn’t allow himself such thoughts, Jon couldn’t help but find him handsome. Much of the too-exposed skin below his neck was pink and tender, as though recently blistered and regrown - with the clear exception of his hands and forearms, where Jon could see thick lines of dark ink lining Gerard’s naturally pallid skin.

With a quiet huff as he noticed what Jon was looking at, Gerard turned his hands, lifting them to a few inches before his face: drawn in unsettling detail - or, no, tattooed, but in strange ink - on the backs were two open, hungry Beholder’s eyes, which in that position stared out over Gerard’s real eyes. There were words inked beneath them, too, snaking around his wrists; Jon craned his neck to read, and then realised how intensely he was studying a near-stranger’s arms and forced himself to straighten up, dropping his gaze in embarrassment. Gerard lowered his hands.

“Done gawking?”

“No.” Jon shot back petulantly, if only for the sake of tacitly acknowledging their shared patron.

“Hm.”

He shifted uncomfortably, tiredly. By the look of it Gerard had been fairly badly burned and was still recovering; Jon felt a little guilty for disturbing him, but it wasn’t as though he would be able to simply come back later.

“You looking for _her_ , then?” asked Gerard after a moment, with a nod toward the shop and a tense inflection in his voice that said he could only mean his mother.

Jon _had_ thought to go to the witch, initially. After the confrontation with the Hunter, he had decided quickly that they needed help from somewhere, preferably somewhere close; he and the others had spent the rest of the day trying their best both to plot and to recover. He had slept the night in Martin and Tim’s room, too exhausted to really protest it, eaten breakfast crammed at their lodgings’ long, communal table, the three of them darkly amused that no one remarked either that Jon did not live there, but also on the bloodstain barely-concealed over his shoulder.

Very much against Jon’s advice, the assistants were creating a diversion. There was an aquarium buried deep in artefact storage, a portal to a domain of the Vast: perfectly safe if shut, only dangerous if a person unsealed it and attempted to investigate the far-too-large aquatic creature that might be glimpsed lurking in its depths - just the kind of thing that servants of the Awful Deep found incredibly amusing. Leaving it even ajar would be catastrophic, but the assistants had promised him only to open it for a moment, causing a minor but noticeable flood and hopefully knocking the entire Institute out of operation for most of the day, as employees rushed to save fragile documents. Jon didn’t like the plan: too risky, too likely to draw Magnus’s anger (he still wouldn’t tell them what had happened, wouldn’t burden them with it, but the thought of horrible visions being forced into his friends’ minds as they had been forced into his was vivid and terrible, and it filled him with sickening terror). They had assured him that they would make it look like an accident, though, and be careful not to actually cause lasting damage. And he had been forced to accept that it was their risk to take; he had not had another choice, another chance to seek advice.

Of those that might be able to give Jon answers, Mary Keay had been an appealing option, if not exactly a safe one. There were no truly _safe_ options, not really. The thought of attempting to contact any other of his master’s wide net of associates had set Jon shuddering: even this would not be worth risking the Lukases’ ire, and while Rayner or Giovanni might know the truth, in meeting with them he would have to allow them to treat him as they wished, without the buffer of Mister Magnus’s interest that had protected him as a child. No amount of potential information was worth that. The moment he had Known that Mary had been absent, he had eagerly embraced the idea of speaking to her son instead.

In answer to the question, Jon shook his head. Still, he wondered what had drawn Mary away - if she was likely to reappear and interrupt their meeting, he should probably know.

“Where is she?”

Gerard just shrugged grimly.

“Off searching for her eerie books, where else?”

“…without you?”

The witch, small and falsely frail-seeming, and her son, wiry and just a little menacing, both outfitted all in black and adorned with spells, both cold-eyed. That was the image Jon was familiar with; the idea of one carrying out their business without the other felt wrong, incomplete.

“Got myself hurt,” muttered Gerard bitterly. “Useless to her like this, aren’t I? She gave me a smack for being stupid enough to get so close to danger, and dumped me here to heal. Why? Did you want me on my feet?”

“No. No, sorry. If it, uh, if it makes you feel any better,” Jon tried pathetically. “I was stabbed yesterday?”

“It doesn’t.” Gerard replied flatly.

Nonetheless, his eyes fell on Jon’s shoulder, instinctively Knowing where the injury was without having to be told. A clean wound, thank god, and not an overly deep one, though the stinging ache of it below the bandages whenever Jon moved his left arm claimed otherwise. He was doing his best to ignore it. Gerard inclined his head curiously.

“And _you’re_ here without that posh bastard that’s got you tied up in Beholding, too. Flying the nest?”

Jon shook his head, picking twitchily at his fingers. Escaping the Eye wasn’t an option, never had been - and he wasn’t sure that he would want to, even if he could.

“I wanted to speak to you because Magnus is planning something. I know it involves me, and the Twisting Deceit, but I don’t know what it is, or why, and I - I need to _Know_.”

Jon cut himself off before he got too upset, swallowing hard. Gerard smirked humourlessly, and extended his arms again, wrists up, his unfastened sleeves falling open.

“You’re lucky it’s me here, then, not _her_. She’s no Watcher, but I am. I can Know.”

Even upside down, Jon could read the words inscribed below Gerard’s skin: _Grant us the sight that we may not know. Grant us the scent that we may not catch. Grant us the sound that we may not call._ It took him a moment to register that they were written in Latin, not that it mattered.

“Haven’t got a temple to the Eye like you.” said Gerard, by way of explanation.

“So you… made your body into one.”

He nodded and pushed his hair back over his shoulder, the movement very slow and careful and sore. The reminder that the rest of Gerard’s body was so badly injured caught Jon’s attention.

“Why didn’t the tattoos burn?”

There was no compulsion behind the words; none that would work on Gerard at least, who was only slightly less powerful with the Ceaseless Watcher than Jon. Still, he answered almost immediately. Being asked a direct question seemed to spark the same emotion in both of them: Jon didn’t know whether that was an effect of the Eye’s power, the urge not only to take knowledge but then to spill it, or whether it was a consequence of the way that they had been raised. Both had been made tools of this terrible world without any choice or understanding of what was happening to them, both only given any scrap of kindness for their usefulness. Instinctively, Jon had always felt that Gerard understood him; he didn’t suppose Gerard was any more used to being asked genuine questions than he was, without hidden traps or ulterior motives, or used to being permitted to answer them. His eyes lit up keenly at the opportunity to explain.

“Ever heard the name Diego Molina?”

“No?”

He hadn’t, but the Knew without having to be told that this was a servant of devastating fire: the name stung with an acrid taste of smoke at the back of Jon’s throat.

“He’s the head of the Order of the Lightless Flame - or, he _was_ , I think. You must have heard of them, there’s no way someone in your line of work couldn’t.”

Jon frowned. He was aware of the Order, in concept, a secret society dedicated to the worship of the Desolation; he had even heard the term Lightless Flame before. The idea that they were a cult well-organised enough to have leaders was new to him, though.

“I didn’t realise that they had a _head_ ,” he admitted. “Like the People’s Church of the Divine Host?”

“Very like that,” Gerard agreed. “Newer, as far as I can tell - but there’s very few of us as old as Rayner and his followers. Except the Dark isn’t exactly a power that goes for symbology, right? And the Lightless Flame loves it. There’s…”

He tipped his head toward a table further back in the room; Jon, aware that it would cruel to force his host to move more than was necessary, jumped up to fetch the scrap of paper he was clearly nodding toward. It held several sketches of the same image: a simple flame all in black, leaping up and outward from a hand, clawed and contorted in agony.

Strangely, he somehow had the sense that he had seen it before.

“That’s their sign, for the most part. Desolation is hardly subtle.”

Jon returned to his seat, still looking uncertainly at the drawings.

“Can’t say what happened in terms of their internal politics, or that I really care, but by the time Mum and I started poking around the Order, Molina seems to have been on his way out. He had some weird ideas about demons and other beings he thought were connected to the Lightless Flame-”

“-Asag,” Jon murmured, remembering his own half-finished research into some renewed interest in a relatively obscure Sumerian demon.

“Yeah, exactly, and others too. He’d been noting down all his conspiracies and syncretisms and what have you in this red, leather-bound notebook, and - well, books touched by that much of an Entity don’t stay normal books. You know that. Mum heard a story about it scorching an attempted pickpocket’s hand, and she decided she wanted it. We’re not dumb enough to try and confront every damn acolyte of _torturing fire_ alone, but like I said, Molina had done something to piss off his old friends: messed up the beginnings of their attempt at a ritual, maybe, or perhaps they’d just gotten sick of his ramblings. Whatever the reason, Mum thought we’d be able to get the book without the Order coming after us, and… I could tell she was right, but I can’t say I liked the plan. One servant of fire and pain alone is still a dangerous thing. Especially one that’s cornered and struggling for survival, because the Desolation aren’t sentimental about consuming their own, and by the look of things he’d been waiting for an attack for a while. Tried to talk her out of it, but she - well, she doesn’t keep me around for commentary.”

Gerard shifted uncomfortably.

“I got too close. We found Molina raving in a dirty room above some tavern he owned; he was throwing his weight around, prattling nonsense. Wasn’t like he was spewing jets of fire, he was just acting like any angry drunk, and we thought we could handle that. Mum got the book with thick leather gloves on, but by that time Molina was radiating heat like a furnace, and he made to run down into the pub proper. I knew if he had access to that many people and all their hopes and dreams, it would - there would be a massacre, a _bonfire_ . So I threw myself at him without thinking about it. _Bad_ idea, but it worked. The pain was indescribable: my whole body _melting_ and scorching in every place we touched.”

His voice trailed off, hollow with the memory of agony, before he forced himself to continue.

“Molina was a big guy; I’m stronger than I look, though, and I took him off guard, slowed him down for a second. Long enough for Mum to slit his throat. We didn’t hang around afterwards to see if he’d stay dead or get up even angrier, or if anyone downstairs would come to see what all my screaming was about, and I can’t say I was particularly lucid with my body so burned - I don’t know if he survived. I could Look, I suppose, but staring into flame is horrible, always feels like it’s going to scorch my retinas. What I _can_ tell you is the way he was gurgling, the way his skin bubbled and boiled around the cut, that wasn’t any ordinary death-rattle. Getting himself incapacitated by a common village witch should hopefully have been embarrassing enough to destroy any standing he had left with the Order, though. What he did to me… I mean, it hurt, it still hurts, and even with the enchantments we’ve got in here it’ll probably scar something awful - but I honestly don’t think he was still powerful enough to do worse in that moment.”

Seeming to remember what Jon had asked him, Gerard looked down at his arms, flexing his fingers experimentally like he expected the blotchy, blistered wounds to remember themselves and spread up his arms at any moment.

“The Ceaseless Watcher protected me, I suppose. Or it protected itself. The ink, it’s not like it’s impervious to any harm - I’ve scraped my arms enough times to know that - but it does a decent job of warding off another Entity’s power. A burn over the Eye would blind it, and it can’t have that, can’t deal with the Dark, so it just… didn’t burn.”

He seemed unsure of how to speak of it, wavering between relief not to have been hurt more severely and fear of the eldritch being that had claimed him for its own. Gerard had sacrificed himself willingly to Beholding, as far as Jon could tell, marked his own body for its manipulations - but knowing that he was in thrall to it, for better or for worse, was still terrifying.

As best he could, Jon gave him a look of sympathy, fingers twitching as he barely stopped himself from raising a hand to his own eyes. He was very aware that his powers affected them physically, sometimes, no matter how desperately he wished to ignore it - Beholding didn’t appreciate aversion to knowledge.

They were silent for a moment as they thought; then Jon narrowed his eyes in consideration. Something about Gerard’s story was nagging at him, and he wasn’t sure why. Not the tale itself, nor the supernatural injury - he had experienced both the pain and the aftershocks of an assault by a servant of another power, and he was familiar with the knotted shame of trying to keep ignorant people safe against the orders of an unfeeling master. Instead, he had fixated on the most mundane detail.

“You said Molina owned a tavern.”

“Yeah?”

“Was that to provide funding for the Order of the Lightless Flame, or…?”

Gerry raised his eyebrows, but dutifully answered.

“No, it was to feed the fire. Plenty of poor drunks come through whom no one would miss if he made tallow of them for candles, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, plenty of folk celebrating happy lives that he could rip away from them. The Order like those kinds of opportunities, little pockets of power. They own a whole array of businesses across the city.”

And Jon realised suddenly where he had seen the burning hand symbol before.

“Farriner’s House,” he breathed, body numb and face slack with horror.

It was the establishment they had helped Sasha move to, after she had escaped the Buried, where Melanie and Georgie had lived for years; a boarding house for young ladies, clean and bare on the surface, old and grimy beneath, but still serviceable enough, still a home. All three had been so glad of it, so happy to escape their previous lives to it.

The sign that swung above its door was faded and flaking, dark with coal-dust and other city pollution, and its version of the flaming hand looked like nothing more than a twisted bundle of sticks, like a fireplace. But it was no hearth: it was a tinderbox, ready to light with all its victims inside, a pyre to a dark god.

“My friends live there,” was all he could choke out, voice weak. Gerry’s face twitched in sympathetic alarm.

“They’d best get out quick, then. And the happier they are, the faster they should run. By fire or by other means, the Desolation will find a way to turn all that to misery and ash.”

His sympathy took on a testing edge.

“Of course, you know what’s happening, with all the manifestations of the Spiral.”

Jon braced himself, nodded, and gave voice to something that he was now quite certain of, but which felt daring, taboo to say aloud.

“Of course. I can feel the power suffusing through the city, just the same as you can, seeping into every last crack. They’re preparing a ritual.”

“Exactly. With that so imminent, the servants of other Entities are getting… either desperate or _weird_ , like they’re being incorporated into It Is Not What It Is.”

The image of the snarling Hunter flashed vividly to the forefront of Jon’s mind.

“If your friends’ landlord is smart, they’re planning to cut their losses soon and flee London, while the Spiral makes its attempt. That’s what Mum is going to do - I don’t know where to, I don’t think it really matters other than that it’s outside the city. Won’t make any difference if the ritual succeeds, of course, but going elsewhere should keep us out of the epicentre if it fails. _She_ doesn’t have any patron to hide behind, and she’s not exactly keen to be dragged into the Spiral.”

Now that Gerard had said it, Jon could see how oddly empty the rooms around them were in uneven patches, like they were being hastily stripped and packed away. He forced his thoughts away from the patient, lurking peril that Sasha, Georgie, and Melanie were in, back to more immediate matters.

“I’ve been researching for months,” Jon admitted, unable to contain the naked fear in his voice. “But what I have is still incomplete. I know the ritual is what they refer to as a… _Great Twisting_ , the servants of the Deceit taking advantage of the fear or madness they’ve sown throughout London to transform the world, make it so that the natural senses cannot be trusted, that sanity and insanity are indistinguishable. But I don’t know how to stop it. There’s a _sculptor_ involved, someone named Gabriel, and the being known as the Distortion.”

At that, Gerard recoiled, face twisting in clear discomfort.

“I’ve met that,” he muttered. “Not a pleasant experience.”

“Yes,” said Jon softly. “I remember.”

The lines of Gerard’s face grew a little softer at the pity in Jon’s voice.

“Yeah, I guess you would.”

That had been the last time they had met, both standing at the sies of their respective guardians: Jon quiet and obedient and helpless, Gerard brittle and skittish, waiting for the strike of a creature he could sense stalking him but categorically could not See. The Distortion had not left such a clear mark on him as Diego Molina, but then, it wouldn’t. It preyed on mental torment, rather than physical destruction.

Jon had worried that Gerard might be angry, that he had done nothing to intervene against his looming, recursive shadow, back then. But there was no condemnation in his eyes, just understanding, and Jon Knew that Gerard had watched his mother do far worse to innocents, as cruel as anything that Jonah Magnus could muster, as unjust as any number of half-finished victims from whom Jon had taken statements and left to their doom and his nightmares.

“You escaped, though,” said Jon. “How?”

Gerard’s lips curled up in wry amusement, and he said, very simply,

“Gunpowder.”

“…what?”

An explosion gesture, performed with no small amount of glee, answered that.

“It’s that simple?” Jon demanded, incredulous.

“It can be.” Gerard shrugged. “Nothing more centring than a _bang_ , after all.”

He glanced down at his burns in consideration.

“Smirke never said what he thought the Spiral’s counterbalance might be, you know? The Buried and the Vast, those are obvious, or the Eye and the Dark - but of the Thirteen the Desolation and the Spiral clash more than you might think. I mean, what’s the point in setting someone alight if they don’t believe the nerves that tell them they’re burning? I’m sure the Devouring Fire would find the ritual a delight to burn, such an elaborate trap of clay and mirrors and madness and lies as exists behind the Distortion’s doors.”

He made eye contact with Jon, that prickling, far-too-sharp gaze that screamed of Beholding.

“All that theory is your lot’s, though, rightfully. I’m a supernatural bloodhound, nothing more, and you came here with questions and a purpose. It wasn’t the Spiral you were trying to learn about.”

The words slipped off Jon’s tongue far easier than they should have, given the fear that had weighed them down; he was being compelled, he suspected, but he was glad of it.

“Yes. I need to Know what Magnus is planning to do to me.”

Determinedly ignoring the clear pain it caused him, Gerard slowly stood.

“Well, I don’t know that. But I can find out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Mentions of mental and physical abuse by Jonah Magnus and Mary Keay  
> \- Supernatural burn injuries (see: ep.12)  
> \- Canon-typical Desolation content 


	17. Diviner

Gerard Keay painstakingly lit six squat, dark candles, and positioned them in a circle marked onto the threadbare, musty-smelling rug. The dyed wax was carved with closed eyes that he angled outwards, and open eyes inwards:  _ let us Look without being Seen _ , he was saying, without the need for words.  _ Ceaseless Watcher, turn your gaze elsewhere as we bid. _

“Gerard,” Jon tried, hovering awkwardly around his host. “Where did you get those?”

Absently, he shrugged.

“Made them. And if we’re going to sit all casual, you should - you should call me, uh, Gerry.”

He stumbled a little more than he meant to over what he clearly meant to be easy words, and Jon blinked in surprise. After a second’s silence, Gerard glanced up, eyes intense and shrewd, hands plucking awkwardly at his over-large shirt.

“Not exactly dressed for _formal_ company, am I?”

Jon nodded, tried for assurance.  _ Gerry _ . He could do that.

With a shaky exhale, Gerry lowered himself to sit cross-legged on the floor, gestured for Jon to join him inside the circle, and placed a stack of what looked like hand-cut playing cards between them. Cartomancy? Jon hadn’t had any patience for Tim’s assumption that a  _ psychic _ might read tarot, and neither would he have respected Melanie or any friend of hers that told bored gentlemen their fortunes, but - well, perhaps he had ought to reconsider, because what would have been mundane in anyone else’s hands all but lit up with power under Gerry’s clever fingers. The cards radiated a creeping, animal-panic sense of  _ something _ dangerous observing them, just out of view.

Jon realised that he was staring, and sat down, carefully folding his legs in the cramped space so that they didn’t quite touch.

“Cozy,” joked Gerry, seemingly embarrassed by the grubby circumstances they were in - and Jon remembered, again, that to people who didn’t know where he came from, it seemed that he might be a gentleman. Before Jon had a chance to make his excuses, though, Gerry snapped his fingers, and the dwindling fire went out with a quiet crackle, leaving them in gloom. There was a rising presence in the room, an intent focus on awful truth, of knowledge that should not be revealed.

Gerry rolled his shoulders back, stretched, then picked up the cards and began to shuffle. They moved like water through his hands, and Jon found himself utterly transfixed, staring at glimpses of the eyes tattooed over the back of Gerry’s hands; obscured and revealed, over and over, in the dim illumination of small lights, they seemed to _blink_. There was muttering filling the air around them, too, though Gerry’s mouth was not moving: a thousand variations on the question  _ what does Jonah Magnus intend for his apprentice _ , in every language Jon knew of, and a good number he didn’t.

All the hair on Jon’s body seemed to stand up on end as the feeling of being watched reached an unbearable degree; even Jon, accustomed to living under the Eye, longed for nothing more than to curl into himself, to hide away beneath feet of lead and stone, where the eyes that seemed to pierce wall and cloth and flesh could no longer find him, perceive him for the small and wretched creature that he was.

And then Gerry spread the cards out across the rug before him in one smooth motion, snapping Jon’s attention back to him and his ever-staring hands.

“Take one.”

Jon hesitated, looking down at the spread, their unadorned white backs stark in the shade. His mundane senses would be no use here: he Looked, allowed himself to be drawn into the power that surrounded them. The the Eye pulled him to a card, and slowly reached to pick it up.

The image of a wickedly sharp sabre glinted back at him.

Gerry shuffled and laid out the arch of cards again.

“Another.”

This time the Eye fixed hard on a card at the very edge of the pack: a crumbling obelisk, lancing up into a stormy sky.

One more time, the deck was cut and displayed.

“And another.”

The card that the Eye drew Jon toward this time extended forward from the others, as though eager to meet him. Beholding’s whispering was excited, loud in Jon’s mind, filling his head with buzzing static.

But the card was blank. Or - no, not quite blank, for when he angled it a little against the faint candlelight, he could see a skull grimacing outward, picked out in palest ivory against the white background.

Gerry looked different, in the midst of his rite. He sat straight, with no hint of the pain he must have been in, his movements fluid and precise. His eyes were very bright even through the deep shadows that surrounded them, that defined his face, but they looked neither at Jon nor down at what he was doing, instead gazing into the middle distance. It was fascinating: to Jon, the Ceaseless Watcher had always been an ability to Know instant, absolute facts, to open and dissect the heads of those that surrounded him. But to Gerry, the Eye opened into means to See through the bounds of natural laws, to uncover answers that simple space and time would hide.

Keeping secrets in the middle of the ritual circle was not possible. Jon’s hand tipped without his conscious intention, revealing his three cards.

Gerry snorted a soft laugh, his long fingers delicately taking hold of the first, the sabre.

“Not a surprise, that you’d select the suit of Swords. The Twisting Deceit is no fan of  _ cutting through deception _ , after all. Cheeky of me to keep them all on just one card, I know, but… well, since I have the ability to do so,”

It turned over in his fingers as he shrugged irreverently; not sleight of hand, not a quick gesture designed to obscure a trick, but true power. The picture simply changed. That, Jon knew, was a talent that Gerry had, the gift to invite him to See one of many different images all painted over each other.

The first was of a throned man, holding a sword aloft, held upside down.

“There are a lot of different swords it wants to show to you. The reversed king,”

Another turn: this time a young girl in a colourful uniform, the sword outsize in her hands.

“And the page. Together, manipulator and manipulated. The two of swords; the eight; the nine;”

Over and over again in his hands: a pair of crossed blades held over a throat; a prisoner caged in by eight swords thrust into the ground; nine swords dangling over a person sat awake in bed. But where usually the figure depicted on each card would be blindfolded, in Gerry’s deck they peered out at Jon, their painted eyes wide with horror.

“But as for  _ what Magnus plans for you _ ,” he repeated again, flipping the card over one last time, his voice deepening as he once again invoked Beholding.

Gerry passed the card back to Jon, this time showing him the seven of swords: a deserter, stolen military sabres heavy in their arms, a triumphant smirk on their staring face. Jon required no interpreter.

“Deception, betrayal,” he murmured, Knowingly. His fingertips rubbed nervously at the rough, uneven edges of the card. “Secret second purposes.”

“Which leads you to the Tower,” agreed Gerry, a regretful twist to his voice. “A sudden, violent change, a catastrophe.”

Jon swallowed hard, and then looked to the last card in his hand. The flickering glow of the candles caught the hollows of the skull in clear detail.

He didn’t need Gerry to tell him that it was Death.

“So I will die.”

“I asked what he plans, Jon,” Gerry cut. “Not what your future is certain to be.”

There was no real difference: as far as Jon was concerned, Magnus could bend reality to his will, not even needing supernatural means to do so. The power that he had cultivated over his corners of both London society and the world of the Dread Powers was unqualified, unquestionable. If he wanted Jon dead, then Jon would die.

Still, Jon shook his head, and dutifully adjusted his question.

“He plans to kill me, then?”

“Maybe,” Gerry tried. “Not necessarily. The card means the death of  _ something _ , the breaking of a cycle. Whatever exists between the two of you, in its current state, he plans to end it - one way or another.”

Jon lowered his gaze to the cards again. The tower, stark against its painted sky, brought thoughts of the Great Twisting to his mind - but that made no sense, why would Magnus’s purposes intertwine with those of the Spiral?

“What does this look like to you?” he asked, voice full of compulsion, summoning his own power, his own terrified curiosity, as the ritual came to a close.

“Like a human sacrifice.” Gerry answered, brutally honest. If he felt Jon pulling the words involuntarily from his mouth, he didn’t protest it.

Jon realised too late that his eyes were full, and scrubbed the heel of his hand over them angrily at them before the tears could fall naturally. The presence around them began to dissipate as Gerry tore his gaze away from the hypothetical future and back to the here and now.

“So…” Jon’s voice was choked, and he hated it, couldn’t stand to look at Gerry’s face and see anything approaching pity there. “So what do I do?”

Gerry shrugged helplessly - then tensed with discomfort and shifted positions, seeming to become aware of the ache of his burns again.

“I’m sorry, Jon. I can only Know truth, not find solutions to it.”

Neither had anything more to say. Jon stood, after a few seconds, and bent to relight the Keays’ hearth, already feeling the bitter chill coming in from the edges of the drafty room. Crossing outside of the ritual settled the usual sensation of the Watcher around him, quite distinct from the otherworldly, intense-but-shielded feeling he had had inside the circle. Jon tried not to pay attention to it; he needed to move, needed to concentrate on something other than despair.

Singeing his fingers just slightly on Mary Keay’s cheap matches would have been a decent distraction if it didn’t remind him that his friends were living in a trap set by the Desolation, the thought a burst of cold terror in his chest.

“You could run,” suggested Gerry, making him jump. When Jon looked over his shoulder, he saw that the older boy had pulled himself up, standing over Jon with one hand braced on the mantlepiece.

“What?”

“You should run.” His voice was more certain now. “There isn’t anything you can do to evade the Entities forever, but getting yourself physically away from Jonah Magnus and his Institute will throw a wrench in whatever scheme he’s built around you. Grab the people you love, and drag them somewhere far away, and hide there for as long as you can. Scotland, maybe. Some cabin up in the most godforsaken corner of the Highlands.”

Jon blinked, the faintest, tiniest glimmer of hope shining in his heart for the briefest of moments. And then reality came rushing back in, and extinguished it.

“I can’t,” he whispered.

“Yeah. I know.”

“I have - I have to protect my - and the Spiral -” He swallowed hard, trying desperately to set his thoughts in order. “I have a  _ duty. _ ”

Gerry’s resigned expression hardened a little, one eyebrow raised.

“You mean a destiny. Destiny is for lords.”

“Yes,” Jon snapped, finally standing to face him. “Well, they often inflict it on the rest of us too. And Magnus made me his heir.”

To his surprise, Gerry began to laugh bitterly.

“Oh, yeah, his ‘heir’.  _ She  _ does that to me, as well. Messes with your head, doesn’t it, when they start throwing little promises of affection at you?”

“Mister Magnus doesn’t -” Jon began, unsure.

“Doesn’t he? You really think he can’t look in your head and see what you wish he was?”

“Shut up,” Jon snapped in embarrassment. “It’s not like that.”

“Yes, it is.” said Gerry, firm; and then, far more quietly. “We all want our parents to love us.”

There was nothing that he could say to that. Jon’s eyes drifted again to the ritual circle, the ties to Beholding that Gerry had given himself for the sake of being useful, making himself into a tool to be wielded by his mother. Mary Keay did not belong to the Eye, although she could have done if she liked; instead she had deliberately skirted the line, treasuring her independence, serving only herself. If she could truly be said to be allied to any patron then it was the End, but that was far from the only Entity to have marked her. All that she really wanted was power, and her son was just another means toward it. Gerry was trapped here with her, just as Jon was trapped with Magnus - only Gerry had nothing so drastic as a prophecy to break him free, no friends or connections to the rest of the world to assist him. 

“Thank you,” Jon said, dredging up his spine from somewhere deep in the midst of all his dread, and turning back away toward the shop and the street. “Truly, Gerry, thank you for all your help. I don’t have any means to pay you, and I - I might be dead, soon, it seems, but if I manage to halt the Spiral, a-and live, I owe you a favour. I’ll help you, t-to get away from your mother. If you wish to.”

Gerry seemed stunned, struck dumb; he had agreed to speak with Jon out of nothing more than curiosity and solidarity, after all, and hadn’t asked for payment, nor for his own perceptiveness to be turned back against him. It took him a few seconds to untie his tongue.

“Alright,” he said, dryly, and sighed. “Alright, Jon. If you make it through this, I’ll hold you to that.”

Jon suspected that it would be  _ making it through this _ that would be the problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Emotional abuse and manipulation  
> \- Supernatural death threat


	18. Unravel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to mabel_but_slytherin for the suggestion about Agnes! I am still really going through it with covid, I feel like I got hit by a bus, so thanks everyone for being patient at the moment.

His instinct would have been to say nothing, to avoid the others and go about his daily business, hold himself still and silent in front of the man planning his doom, and try to resolve the situation alone.

But Jon had learned that the cogs around him would move, with or without the knowledge he could give them, and that keeping information from them would only put them in more danger. He desperately didn’t want them in any more danger than they were already.

So he had forced down the responses conditioned into him by eight years of life under the Eye, and he had called everyone down into the archives - his assistants, Georgie, Melanie, even the Admiral. The cat had caught sight of all of its favourite people heading down the same stairs and decided that this meeting needed its presence; Jon, who hadn’t realised quite how stiff, how close to the edge of panic, he had been before he had the Admiral’s heft settled in his arms, deeply agreed.

Jon opened his mouth, and told the truth.

(Not the full truth. Even now, he couldn’t quite manage that. It wasn’t a matter of distrust or misplaced protectiveness anymore, but instead… pride, perhaps. They didn’t need to know that he would die. That was a private secret, to be feared privately.)

He described the Spiral, the Great Twisting, what Gerry Keay had suggested to him. It was the rituals that took the most explanation, though he had alluded to them before; the concept that at any moment, anywhere across the world, any one faction of squabbling occultists might bring the world to its end was disturbing enough, never mind the idea that they and all their apocalyptic power had merely been the inventions of an Eye-touched architect. Smirke had not known whether he had discovered the rituals or created them, and no matter how they investigated neither, to their frustration, did Magnus and his apprentice.

That the rituals were Smirke’s doing was just one theory, Jon clarified, tentatively. The Dark’s ritual had been attempted for as long as there had been eclipses, according to what members of the People’s Church believed, as well as Rayner’s own smug insinuations; the Everchase, utterly unfulfillable, had been ongoing for as long as could be traced; and doubtless countless others had been performed and failed throughout history, by those who might not even have known what they were doing, now long lost to time. Jon couldn’t say how near any had come to victory. There had been a dangerously close-to-completed attempt at the Unknowing almost a century ago, and also traces of what Jon suspected to be an almost identical ritual of the Stranger 1,600 years earlier, in Hellenistic Egypt, with neither successful. None had ever managed yet to run its course - in every case he knew of, servants of another entity had intervened.

“We do not like to share power,” Jon admitted, grimly.

Martin shyly raised a hand, ignoring how everyone else had just freely spoken over each other.

“Yes?”

“You said every entity has its own ritual, right, e-even if some can never actually work? So, then… the Eye must have one, too?”

Jon nodded, avoided eye contact for a moment as he thought of how best to phrase it.

“Theoretically, yes. We don’t have a record of any actual attempts, though, and Mister Magnus doesn’t like to talk about it. He doesn’t seem to think the ritual would be viable, currently - you need a strong sense of cultural fear to fuel something so drastic, like the Spiral has at present - but in their early writings he and Smirke called it the ‘Rite of the Watcher’s Crown’.”

Martin seemed to have more questions, but he took too long chewing them over, and Melanie interrupted him.

“Alarming that the only thing preventing your creepy boss from ending the world is the thought that he doesn’t have enough  _ fuel _ ,” she deadpanned. “But continue, Jon.”

Magnus was not nearby, today. He was somewhere in a centre of power, Jon could sense that, Eyes scanning across all within his domain - but not physically close. Jon knew why, understood that his master had simply done as most of the avatars across London had done and taken shelter from the incoming power of the Spiral. It was just difficult not to take that as confirmation that he had been abandoned for cannon-fodder.

Melanie and Georgie were sitting on Sasha’s desk as though joined at the hip, as usual, their dresses laid over each other. Despite very purposefully making sure not to See anything more of their relationship than they wished to show him (or that he had already eavesdropped upon), even Jon could tell that they had reconciled over the day since the fight beneath the bridge; that, if anything had changed at all, they had become closer. He was happy for them, even if his own relationship to them had become… complicated.  _ Forgive me _ , Georgie’s letter had said, and he didn’t know if he had, yet, but he at least understood. It had been horrible to be forced to read her statement - painful, as he struggled to free himself of the compulsion, but also distressing, in the knowledge that she had been lying to him (albeit by omission, and no more than he had, to her) - but if he had been in her circumstances, Jon didn’t know that he could say he wouldn’t have done the same. He simply didn’t have the energy to resent her; after all, he had never  _ asked _ about her affinity to the End. And he liked Georgie, wanted his one straightforward friendship back. Martin, on the other hand, had dutifully taken on responsibility for being angry toward Georgie on his behalf, and was glaring waspishly at her when he thought Jon wasn’t looking.

Melanie was a different matter. Somewhat reluctantly grateful to him for saving her, and without the Slaughter inside her itching for blood, she didn’t attempt to pick arguments with Jon, and the two of them had quickly discovered that arguing was the only way they had known how to speak to each other. Their personalities still clashed, but they would have to relearn communication. She seemed so brittle, now: her mind clear, but wracked with horror and uncertainty. When Jon had put him down, the Admiral had curled up immediately in her lap, sensing her need for reassurement.

Of all of them, Georgie seemed to be the most sceptical of the so-called Great Twisting - but she listened calmly to the evidence, paid attention as Jon outlined what Smirke had seen as likely comprising a ritual of the Spiral, and what they already knew was happening in London.

Jon had expected more disbelief from the girls when he stammeringly explained what Gerry had told him about the Order of the Lightless Flame and its hunting practices, about how their home was planning to consume them. With the exception of some initial confusion, however, their horror was suspiciously quiet, tinged with realisation rather than shock, as though they were somehow unsurprised.

“…‘Farriner’s’ House.” said Sasha, after a moment, throat dry. “After Thomas Farriner, the baker who started the Great Fire of London. I  _ thought _ that it was a strange coincidence, but I - I wasn’t going to question somewhere safe, right when I needed it.”

“They’ve always had such a high turnover of tenants,” Georgie added quietly. “People come and go all the time, that’s normal, especially in this city, especially in a house like that, so I didn’t think it was anything sinister at first, but… so many of them. And it’s always the most defenceless girls that disappear most suddenly. Someone foreign, usually, no family or friends nearby to come looking for her, excited about the future-”

“-the ones that hang around chatting to Mrs Nolan,” agreed Melanie, sitting up straight in distress. “Or that talk to that girl in the attic.  _ Shit _ .”

“Mrs Nolan - your landlady?” asked Jon, intense with thought. They nodded. “What other girl?”

All three exchanged a glance, before Melanie shrugged, a little uncomfortably.

“I don’t know her name,  _ Annie  _ or  _ Agnes  _ or  _ Agatha _ , something like that? I’ve never spoken to her: red hair, sharp little face, sort of a mournful air around her, doesn’t talk much to anyone - except the girls that disappear. She’s younger than any other resident, and she’s just sort of been living in the attic for as long as anyone remembers, I suppose.”

“She’d been there for years before I ever moved in,” Georgie volunteered. “And she would have been maybe twelve or thirteen, then?”

“Never eats with the others,” Melanie went on. “Never seems to go out, never so much as brushes up against anyone else. I mean, that’s unusual, but it wouldn’t be spooky if standing near her wasn’t like standing next to a furnace, and if I couldn’t see her eyes  _ glowing _ , burning from the inside _. _ It’s my eyes, the spirits, but to me she looks like she’s full of fire.”

“They’re unusual even if you can’t see like Melanie,” added Sasha. “Amber eyes, really intense, like a predator. And - do you think, those candles that she -”

“Oh, god,” breathed Georgie in revulsion. Melanie cursed vehemently beneath her breath.

Jon almost didn’t have to ask: Gerry had mentioned that Molina  _ made tallow  _ of his victims, and he knew the kind of act the Desolation was capable of. But Melanie was already speaking, righteous outrage and anguish in her voice.

“She’s always burning these foul-smelling candles - none of us can afford good candles, but hers are  _ awful _ , and not even bright or warm, just burning with this tiny ember and giving out those horrid fumes. I’ve seen her just… craning over them, breathing it all in like it’s clean air. I thought maybe she was sick.”

Wordless, Jon shook his head, brows furrowed. Whatever this girl was, she was not unwell or frail. She sounded extraordinarily powerful, and very dangerous indeed, to be that way so young - the servants of the Desolation must have been making a concerted effort to hide her away, to make sure she passed beneath the notice of the Eye, and anyone else that might care to keep tabs on such developments. For what purpose? Surely they couldn’t also have been planning a ritual of their own, so soon?

“Not sick,” he said eventually, seriously. “A threat. But one that we can use against the Spiral, I hope. I need you to bring your landlady here; Gerry - ah, Gerard Keay, the witch’s son - theorised that the Lightless Flame might be able to interrupt the Great Twisting. They won’t risk revealing that girl, whatever she is to them, but I don’t think that you’ll have too much trouble persuading Mrs Nolan to speak with me. She’ll know of Jonah Magnus and his Institute by reputation, if nothing else. If she’s reluctant to enter somewhere so deep under Beholding’s power, assure her that it’s under a truce, and one I can prove. Tell her that I’m offering her the opportunity to burn something far larger and more interesting than a few runaways and what they can fit in their suitcases: a chance to burn madness itself, reduce it back to blistering reality.”

Georgie was neither daunted nor impressed by his grand words; this new, more fragile Melanie seemed affronted, upset, but a little intimidated too, not so blinded to the danger by her anger over those runaway girls’ lives lost that she was ready to attack; Sasha, however, was professional and capable as always, nodding simply, and Jon knew at once that she had memorised his words and would use them exactly. He gave her a small, tense smile in recognition.

“You should go together, too, it’s safer that way. Get as many of your things away from Farriner’s House as possible, then meet back down here. It’s,”

He paused to scrub his hand over the back of his neck, unreasonably ashamed. This was not something to which he was comfortable confessing - but he had promised himself that he would give them as much of the truth as possible, so he quashed his unease and continued.

“It’s safer in the Archives. They belong to Mister Magnus, technically, of course; by law, the entire Institute is his. But this is  _ my _ domain.  _ I  _ have power here, in this basement. I’m the Archivist. That means I can offer you some degree of protection, here, that you might not have elsewhere.”

For the first time, the title felt like more than a doom. When he dared to look up, however, there was no suspicion or mistrust on his friends’ faces; he supposed that there was little new information in what he had said, really, except that he had stated it openly. The idea that they would  _ not  _ hate him for what he was still felt alien, though, even if he was capable of protecting them from something worse.

Jon mustered himself and continued. He was tired after speaking for so long, and not just physically.

“Tim and Martin, you too. As far as I can tell there’s nothing sinister about your lodgings, but you should make sure that you and your belongings are safe, and tell anyone who trusts you enough to get away from the city, then come back here. I think the hour of reckoning is close, but we still have a little time; hours, probably, or if we’re lucky maybe days.”

They took that as the clear dismissal that it was. The girls began to go about the motions of readying themselves to confront their landlady, and Melanie handed the sleeping Admiral to Martin despite the cat’s lazy  _ mrrp _ of protest, ignoring Martin’s surprise. Of all them, Martin had the least to do. He had no one to warn, for besides the people already in this room he had remained isolated from the rest of the world, and so he had nowhere to go. But it was clear that he needed to go  _ somewhere _ .

Tim had not said a single word throughout the entire proceedings. Jon Knew that he was listening and absorbing information, but he had done nothing but sit stock-still with his chin angled toward the floor, an edge of distress almost tangibly radiating out from him, and stared at Jon.

Desperate not to intrude, Martin mumbled something about keeping an eye out and hurried upstairs to give Jon and Tim some space.

They hadn’t really had a chance, before then. The time between his assistants learning the truth of the supernatural and the approaching ritual was shorter than it had felt, and Tim had spent the majority of that period focused on the Hunt, thoroughly distracted from the sense of purpose that had brought him to the Institute in the first place. Now, though, with doom pressing in, there was no more time for delay, and Jon watched Tim steel himself to ask the question that had been burning in him since the first moment they had started to investigate the Great Twisting. His voice was strained and his eyes were haunted.

“Is that what happened to Danny? These… Spiral creatures?”

He gave no more context; Tim must have worked out that Jon Knew about his brother, had Seen it almost instantly when they first met. Biting the inside of his lip, Jon shook his head.

How to clarify the difference between those two terrors when he barely knew how to put it into words himself?

“Not quite, no. I’m sorry, Tim, I know that -” Jon cut himself off, trying and failing to find a way of saying that he knew that the Spiral probably summoned terrible memories for Tim without sounding patronising. He tried to speak in a measured tone, to place some theoretical distance between them. “What your brother happened across was an aspect of the Stranger, not the Spiral. The Circus of the Other, the mannequins and clowns that you saw, they prey on the fear of… wrongness, more than madness? Creeping unease, instinctual mistrust; the knowledge that something isn’t as it should be. It’s a fear arising from lack of comprehension of what once was well-known, so it relies on being  _ aware  _ that something has been warped out of its correct state - whereas the Spiral is a fear of uncertainty and anxious introspection, never sure of anything. They might appear to manifest in a similar way, but the reaction the manifestation is attempting to provoke is very different.”

Jon was doing a very poor job of making himself clear. It was all true, what he was saying, all his actual understanding of Spiral and Stranger. Frustratingly, he couldn’t draw on his own encounter with I Do Not Know You in the form of the organ-grinder and its automata (who had done their best to actually  _ grind his organs _ ); if anything, experience with the Stranger only made it harder to describe in words. Tim’s usually friendly features wore an expression of despair, and Jon knew he needed a different approach. After a moment of wringing his hands, he settled on directness.

“It’s about what scares you most,” Jon stated, simply, factually. “The idea that something familiar has become unknowable, or that nothing makes sense enough to be known at all: an alien, or a liar. The Circus hurt Danny by severing him from his agency, doing something to him that he could not comprehend, and they hurt you with the knowledge that what looked like your brother, what used to be your brother, wasn’t anymore. The Spiral would have had you believe that you had misunderstood something about reality, and it had never been your brother. You wouldn’t have been able to tell.”

With his legs unsteady beneath him, Tim stood and turned away, trying to hide the stricken look on his face.

“I’m sorry,” Jon said, again, uselessly.

Tim nodded, unable to really speak, and eventually choked out,

“Can the Stranger force you to… forget its victims, too? Mess with memory like the Spiral can?”

A thousand myths of changelings and huldra and imposters flashed through Jon’s mind; he was all too aware of statements on the topic of friends taken and replaced.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad it wasn’t that, then,” Tim croaked. “I’m glad that I can still remember him, before -”

Still looking toward the wall, he took a deep, bracing breath.

“We’ll take them down,” he promised, to no one in particular, that firm resolve in his voice which sometimes showed through his relaxed veneer. “We’re not going to let them do that to the entire world.”

Jon nodded, although he knew Tim couldn’t see it, and watched the other man’s back as he walked up the stairs and out into the city.

Somewhere, very distantly, Jon felt something start to twist.

It was harmless, as of yet. Its contortions were smaller than small, so infinitesimally tiny that they could have no discernible impact on the world around them. But it was turning now, milling against reality, and with every passing second it gained ever-so-gradually in momentum.

The ritual had begun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:
> 
> \- Canon-typical Desolation content, including ritual murder of vulnerable young girls  
> \- Discussion of Spiral / Stranger unreality.


	19. Brand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please check the end notes for content warnings. Jude Perry isn't in this story but she is in spirit.

She wasn’t a particularly tall woman.

In truth, Jon didn’t know what he had been expecting, but - well, perhaps he had been hoping for a weapon that he could wield against the Spiral, someone fearsome enough to drive away the end of the world. Instead, he had Mrs Nolan. She was short, plump, with thinning white hair and a dirty apron over her dress; the signs of her affinity to Desolation showed only in the cruel, ravenous gleam to her eyes, and the greasy sheen to her skin.

Perhaps ‘greasy’ wasn’t precisely the right word, Jon discovered, as she approached, following Melanie to the courtyard outside the Institute. ‘Waxy’ was more accurate. From ten feet away, he could feel the heat radiating from her, could quite clearly see the strong, meaty hands she had made for herself of her molten flesh - hands that, he was sure, would be capable of cooking all his internal organs before he’d have a chance to so much as open his mouth, much less ask a question.

But to the outside observer, she seemed nothing more than an ordinary boarding-house keeper. She even smiled affably at him when he stood up and bowed a little to acknowledge her - keeping his hands clasped politely behind his back, safely away from her. Melanie stepped to join him, nose wrinkled in discomfort at the older woman. Nolan had not brought the girl with her, the weapon the Desolation was in the process of creating. He doubted that she would acknowledge such a thing unless he forced it.

“Hello, Madam.”

“Hello, Archivist,” she sneered, not bothering to hide either her amused scorn or the fact that she knew exactly who - exactly what - he was. “Not going to greet me properly?”

“Well, forgive me, but I think I’d better not come any closer.”

She seemed to like Jon meeting her barb for barb, at least for the moment, and her ruddy face broke out in a grin.

“Our Melanie did say you were a standoffish brat. Not to me, maybe - but she was yelling it, anyways. The girls do forget sometimes that down in the kitchen I can hear everything they blather on about in their rooms.”

“I’m not  _ your _ anything,” Melanie snapped, shaking with rage.

Jon didn’t need to press to Know that Melanie had been friendly with many of the girls who disappeared from Farriner’s House overnight, and that even if she hadn’t been, the knowledge that she had been living under the roof of a monster who turned innocent lives to ash would still have torn at her. He couldn’t even imagine what Mrs Nolan must have looked like to her, now that Melanie understood what her ‘spirits’ meant.

“Oh, no, dear,” crooned Mrs Nolan, broad and vaguely cockney. It was not her real voice. “You belong to another, don’t you? Dug it out, but it was too late by then, and you can never properly clean a wound like that. It’ll get its claws back into you soon enough. Do let me know if you get hurt again, though - I could always cauterise it for you.”

“Stop it.” Jon cut, before Melanie’s fury could drive her to do anything reckless.

Nolan wasn’t  _ wrong _ , but she was antagonising Melanie deliberately - and Melanie becoming angry was dangerous, especially in the face of helplessness and violence; it invited the Slaughter keenly.

“I asked my friends to give you a message.” 

“ _ A chance to burn madness itself _ .”

The accent Mrs Nolan affected was, he presumed, an imitation of Sasha’s, although it could have just as easily been a mockery of his. Both had been put through the same elocution lessons.

“A rather grand statement for  _ help me screw the twisty weirdos over _ , but I got the meaning, loud and clear, yes.”

Jon didn’t have time to play games, though he knew they were both acting straight into the archetypes their patrons had made for them: the Desolation was all for toying with its meals, drawing its victims along, whereas the Eye craved simple fact.

“And? Are you interested?”

She crossed her thick arms over her chest.

“Interested in what? In furthering the Ceaseless Watcher’s lazy, comfortable power? Helping it gaze over us all, O infinitely wise and ignorant?”

Jon frowned.

“Furthering th- this isn’t about Beholding, Mrs Nolan; there’s a direct, existential threat  _ currently in progress _ , and the Spiral’s ritual could-”

She waved one hand, cutting him off. He could feel the waft of hot air that the movement created.

“Please, Archivist, don’t play dumb. I may just be a simple landlady -”

She wasn’t, he Knew; he could See a long, smouldering life stretching out behind her, even some positions of real power, all used to spread misery and terror to those beneath her thumb. And she knew he Knew, too; there was an ironic twist to her lips.

“-but I can sense Beholding’s power rising just as clearly as It Is Not What It Is. Maybe not as fast, but it’s in the ascendant. Who’s to say that this isn’t some ploy to turn the Order of the Lightless Flame against the Spiral and get rid of us both?”

Jon was dumbfounded. The Eye, in the ascendant? How? For a genuine moment he froze, no idea what she could possibly be referring to - except, of course, for him. He had been using more and more of his powers with the Ceaseless Watcher to protect his friends, had been leaving the Eye’s mark on those other powers that he had brushed up against to do so, and that would not have gone unnoticed to those who knew how to measure such things. Mrs Nolan had been involved in the creation of a child of Dread Power too, after all.

While he stumbled over this accusation, she had taken his silence as an admission of guilt.

“And you musn’t think that just because we’re so close to your centre of power that I can’t harm you,” Mrs Nolan went on, just as jovial, just as deadly. “Ever seen an eyeball melt? It’s a wonderful picture. I can leave you and your pesky little voyeur of a god charred and shrivelled and unable to see anything but your own agony.”

“Then why don’t you?” Jon shot back, finally finding his tongue. “You came here for a reason, I assume. It’ll be decades before Beholding is ready for a ritual, much as it pains me to share that information, and the Great Twisting would be no better for the Lightless Flame than it would be for us. If you travelled all the way through London on streets that are imminently about to stop being comprehensible, just to turn down the offer, you’re a far greater fool than you seem.”

The heat radiating in her increased briefly to the temperature of a raging furnace, forcing Jon to blink at watering eyes.

“Watch it, Archivist.”

“I intend to.” he countered cheekily. “Although I very much doubt that  _ you  _ plan to be so passive against the Spiral. So what’s the hesitation?”

He tilted his head to scrutinise her. Gerry wasn’t wrong: trying to Look at the Desolation was unpleasant, like staring straight at the sun. But the thought of Gerry brought the solution to Jon’s mind all at once.

“Molina,” he answered himself, before Nolan had a chance, his mind suddenly filled with Beholding’s whispers. “Of course - having the head of the snake cut off so soon before a crisis is inconvenient, to put it mildly, no matter how defanged that head might have been. Creating the Desolation’s own personal angel of death,  _ Agnes _ , that was your husband’s idea, but when the cult turned on Arthur - yourself included, of course, madam - you were left holding the pieces of that plan, raising the girl, no clue what else to do with her. Diego had some ideas, but he was never a popular leader, nor a particularly clever one. And now both he and Arthur are gone. The Order doesn’t have any direction. You came here because… there’s no one to tell you not to.”

Mrs Nolan’s red face became redder, and she opened her mouth - but Jon cut her off again.

“No, I don’t expect you to take orders from me, but there’s more than one kind of direction. I need what the Desolation can do, and you need what the Eye can know. A map.”

Melanie was watching them, eyebrows raised; Jon turned to her, almost excitedly, Knowing now what he had to do.

“Melanie, there’s - in the archives, Sasha’s been working on a chart. If you can bring that, and some paper, I can make a map of the Spiral. It won’t make any sense, but it’ll be true.”

With some reluctance, but sensing the urgency, Melanie turned to march away downstairs. As she did, Mrs Nolan’s demeanour didn’t change, not entirely, but without the potential victim to perform to, she allowed some of the jolly innkeeper facade to fade away. Although she wasn’t a Stranger, merely wearing her skin as a disguise, neither was she simply all she appeared to be. She seemed suspicious, particularly wary given Jon’s ability to pluck information about Agnes, the Order’s greatest secret, from the air.

“A map for what?”

Jon folded his hands at the small of his back again, and shrugged slightly.

“Where to go, what to burn. You would be dismantling the material ritual - destroying its architecture, its artefacts, its participants.”

Without Melanie’s presence, he felt more comfortable mentioning the inevitable casualties of this effort - primarily servants of the Twisting Deceit would be killed, yes, but he knew that a great many of them had never intended to end up where and what they had become, and that many could not be said to fully understand the consequences of their actions. Not to mention that he didn’t believe for a second that the Desolation would hesitate to burn innocents and victims, too. But he still preferred those dozens dead than all of humanity trapped forever within a world of the Spiral’s design.

“Meanwhile, I will reverse the Great Twisting’s immaterial progress. The Spiral demands not to be Known, so I will do my best to Know it. Hopefully that would have been enough intervention even without additional help from the Order of the Lightless Flame, but you and your companions delaying and interfering with the ritual might give us the extra time we need.”

She tilted her head in consideration. There was something in her eyes that was hungry, but Jon, used to far more intense stares than hers, didn’t shift beneath the burning gaze.

“Where’s your keeper, little Archive?”

Jon’s jaw ticked slightly.

“Observing, of course. Somewhere safe.”

“Oh, well, yes. Better question is, why aren’t you there too? Careless of him, to leave you out in the open like that. Doesn’t exactly convince me this isn’t some Beholding plot.”

_ A human sacrifice _ , said Gerry’s voice in his mind, frank and loud.

“It’s not a plot,” Jon said, quiet and serious. He was being Watched, but he didn’t care - what did it matter, now? “It’s not even about Beholding; I’m not fighting the Spiral just so that the Ceaseless Watcher can end the world in its own special way. I’m not concerned about the rituals. It’s about protecting as many people as possible.”

Mrs Nolan laughed. The noise sounded wrong, as though it didn’t belong in her unassuming, matronly body: it was openly cruel, harsh, truthful to what she secretly was.

“ _ Humans _ . Pathetic, grey creatures, dumb and scared as animals, as easily snuffed out as cheap matches. What a boring cause to sacrifice yourself for.”

“I may not be quite human, anymore,” Jon said, quietly, shaking his head to himself. “But I - I’m still more than just a component of the Eye.”

His eyes focused sharply on her, keen as razors.

“Why does my motivation matter? I’ve offered you a simple deal, madam. Will you take it?”

She pouted.

“I’m tempted, Archivist. Can’t say I understand, or believe you - a person needs to forfeit, for something they claim to care so much about. As far as I can see you haven’t.”

“Anything.” Jon said, simply. “Whatever it takes to prove myself to you, I’ll do.”

“Be polite, then. Didn’t your master ever teach you any manners? Greet me like you ought to.”

Obediently, Jon stepped toward her. At the sight of her outstretched hand, however, he hesitated. He knew with complete certainty that it would brand him as surely as hot iron. If he was lucky it was possible that his right hand might still be functional, and even if not, he was ambidextrous, more or less, but -  _ the pain was indescribable _ , Gerry had said..

“Come now,” she crooned. “It won’t hurt.”

Jon swallowed hard, and forced himself closer. It didn’t matter anymore. What was a few more hours of discomfort, with the end so close?

“Please, Mrs Nolan,” he said, mustering himself. “Leave the lies to the Spiral.”

He took her hand in his, delicate and proper.

And screamed as his flesh sizzled in her iron grip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Canon-typical Desolation content  
> \- Burn injury (see ep.89)  
> \- Self-sacrificial attitude, bordering on suicidal


	20. Revere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, a chapter from Martin's perspective! Slightly late update, but post-covid fatigue is killing me, and it's another long one.

Martin had no idea what to do. Take care of the Admiral, that was fine, that was within his ability, even if it felt like nothing of any use at all - but he had no idea what he could do to actually  _ help _ . Though the cat was consoled a little by being held, they were both restless; the Admiral’s tail swished back and forth, yellow eyes darting at nothing, hissing at thin air. When Martin was very little, his grandfather had told him that cats could see ghosts. He didn’t still believe that, of course, not exactly, but it was clear that the Admiral had noticed  _ something _ . Perhaps he could see fear as colours, like Melanie. Perhaps the poor cat could no more trust his senses than a human could, under the influence of the ritual that was apparently beginning. Or perhaps he was merely unsettled by the tension in the archives.

_ The End Of The World. _ It sounded too momentous to be true, so much grander than their quiet work here, cataloguing old books and tales of supernatural encounters, so much more drastic than - than even all the powers that had attacked them, the beast that had chased him and Tim, the pit that had swallowed Sasha whole, the creeping prickle of Being Watched that they all felt in this place. The ritual seemed infinitely more dangerous to Martin than the private hell that still swelled up inside him at quiet moments: the Lonely was a poisonous whisper of false comfort, yes, but superficially it seemed at least a gentle kind of terror. Solitude can be a blessing as well as a curse. Who doesn’t like to be alone, sometimes?

Captain Lukas had certainly presented the isolated berth he had allocated Martin aboard the Tundra that way, as a gift, somewhere under his protection. The strange, lonely shifts he had worked had seemed generous, too, and if the hundreds of miles between him and land and everything he had ever known had not felt  _ safe _ , exactly, then they had still been a sort of solace. Martin had spent his teenage years working himself to exhaustion for the sake of a mother who despised him, never really understanding why. She had finally passed while he was on the ship, and that had been an awful, guilty relief as well. Alone out at sea there had been no one to yell and snap at him, no one for him to disappoint, no one to reject him when he reached out for affection - and after a few months, there had been no one at all, not ever. Eventually Martin would have faded from the world entirely, nothing left of him but a faint whiff of despondent fear, and nobody would have noticed. He found he still considered the concept rather poetic: unnoticed mist, drifting free, melancholy but harmless.

If what Jon said was to be believed, Forsaken likely had a ritual of its own, a plan to shift the universe into an endless landscape of fog and facelessness. But Martin couldn’t quite imagine it.

Some of the horrors that Magnus had thrown Jon into, on the other hand,  _ those  _ Martin could very easily believe capable of attempting an apocalypse. He didn’t know the precise shape of most of them, and he didn’t have to: the glimpses that he had caught from Jon’s nightmares had been enough. Night after night, Martin had seen his eyes flicker beneath their lids, face drawn tight with fear, breath shallow and fast, lips moving in barely-voiced, long-ignored pleas against terrors years since gone. Martin’s presence had been something of a comfort, he hoped. He had always been taught never to wake a dreamer, but eventually he had been unable to stand Jon’s unconscious crying, and he had gently shaken him awake and held him safe until Jon remembered where he was. Neither of them had really known how to talk about it, but it had helped, he knew it had. The way that Jon had stared at him afterwards as he fell asleep again… Martin had prayed that his face was not so red as it felt, at the unfamiliar feeling of being look at as though he was worthy of awe. And much as he kept that moment in a secret place in his heart, it had hurt him to know that Jon took such simple acts of kindness with so much wonder. Jon, who, no matter how wrapped up in his own head, would crawl through any torment for any of them.

Martin didn’t want the world to end. But if the price of its continued existence came at Jon’s suffering or death, he didn’t know that he could bear that either.

It took him a moment to realise that the Admiral was butting its head against his knees where he had sat at his desk, chirping insistently at being ignored.

“Right, right,” he murmured, smiling a little despite himself as the cat blinked in contentment at his touch. The Admiral’s needs were simple: he didn’t need any more reassurance than a brief pat, didn’t know the stakes of what they were about to do.

“You alright there, Martin?”

Startled, Martin jumped. He hadn’t heard Tim coming back into the archives, but here he was, a hastily packed knapsack in his hand and a distracted look in his eyes. Visible all throughout his frame was the stress Martin felt too, the horrible anticipation of waiting for some sign of the beginning of the end.

“Sorry, yes, I’m fine,” Martin blurted automatically. Not wholly true, but not exactly a lie either: he was unharmed, yet. “Are you?”

Tim’s eyes were very red. It took him a few moments to muster himself, to plaster his fake, charming smile over his strained expression, and Martin knew at once that he was about to try and evade the question. Whatever he had stayed to speak to Jon about, it couldn’t have been an easy topic.

Fortunately for Tim, though, he didn’t have to answer. They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs and muffled, apprehensive conversation, which quickly revealed itself to be Georgie and Sasha. The girls met their nervous gaze and fell silent.

“She’s here,” Georgie explained quietly, nodding her chin upwards. She must be referring to their landlady, the servant of devouring fire; who else? “Melanie took her over to speak with Jon in the courtyard - he warned that Mrs Nolan wouldn’t be able to stand it down here, what with all the…”

She gestured vaguely to the air, in what they commonly understood to be the sign for  _ the relentless staring of supernatural eyes. _ Perhaps if anyone else had said it, Martin would have smiled, but he had to resist the urge to glare bitterly at Georgie. It  _ wasn’t _ that he was jealous, no matter what Tim thought - he was glad that Jon had friends, really, genuinely happy for him - but that he couldn’t find it in himself to trust someone who had tricked them, who had kept information from them that might have led to Jon  _ not _ being stabbed. Not after he had been seen that expression of helplessness and terror plastered all over Jon’s face while he was compelled to read her statement. Martin knew that he could be petty, but this, he thought, was justified.

The Admiral, however, was a spineless traitor who started purring and leapt off his lap at the sight of her.

“Shouldn’t be long,” Sasha added. “Jon said either Mrs Nolan had already agreed to his plan or there was nothing he could do to persuade her.”

“Ever the optimist,” teased Tim, receiving a slightly tight smile in return for it.

She was shifting uncomfortably, hands pushing at her hips and lower back. Martin recognised the action, the barely-repressed urge to tug the laces out from her corset and alleviate the stiffness, the threat of the Buried; they all recognised it.

“Your dress?” asked Georgie, gently. Sasha sighed.

“It’s - I mean, it’s better, now, than what I used to wear, and I don’t… I don’t believe that the ground is going to open beneath me any time soon, and it’s not as though there’s anyone to force me to dress formally, and yet, I still…”

And yet the fear of falling back into the domain from which she had escaped still remained. Martin knew how that felt, and gave her a sympathetic grimace when she looked to him - but Tim had a better response than that, and he was already on his feet, holding out his knapsack. She blinked at it.

“Tim?”

“Miss James,” he offered, covering awkwardness with joking formality. “I hope you can forgive the presumption, but I anticipated that you might face this problem, and I may have a solution.”

Eyebrows raised, she took the bag from his hands, and opened it to -

“Is this… your waistcoat? The one with the red flowers?”

“It’s a whole spare outfit,” he explained. “Necktie and all. Under normal circumstances, I understand, venturing outside dressed like an  _ exceptionally stylish _ young man -”

“ _ Tim, _ ”

“- might not be the most agreeable experience, but since everyone in London is going to be too busy staring into endless, hellish recursions to care, I thought you might at least be comfortable?”

For a few seconds, Sasha only stared blankly at the canvas bag in her hands. And then a surprised smile, as gradual and bright as a sunrise, spread across her face.

“…thank you.”

He grinned, as though his very unexpected kindness were perfectly normal. That was a gift Tim had, of putting everyone at ease in almost any circumstances. Martin wished he could say he was envious; for the most part it only bewildered him.

“Of course!”

Georgie touched Sasha’s arm, snapping her out of it, and nodded in the direction of the archives proper.

“Come on, I’ll help you. This place should be empty, right?”

Martin nodded; no one else had entered the building all day, and he was beginning to wonder if Mister Magnus had ordered them home for the day. There had been no time to ask, though.

“Good. Avert your eyes, lads.”

They turned around promptly, though probably even if they had been looking, the thick wooden bookshelves would have obscured anything they ought not to see. Rather than cast about for a conversation he and Tim were really too tense to carry on, Martin scooped up the Admiral again and quietly fussed him, and they both listened in slight embarrassment to the whispers and laughter and rustles of fabric emerging from the stacks.

“How’d you know her size, Tim?” teased Georgie dryly.

He huffed, and called back,

“If it doesn’t fit, just fold it and tuck it in, it’ll look fine.”

“Oh, yes, I bet you know all about adapting clothes like that.” She lowered her voice, not so much that the boys couldn’t still hear. “How do you think Tim would look in your dress, Sasha? Trim waist, long neck…”

Sasha laughed, startled, and said something in reply too soft to make out. For a moment Georgie whispered back.

“I’m sure he’s found a way to work around those broad shoulders of his,” said Georgie eventually, audibly. “My real question is how he doesn’t trip over the long skirts.”

Tim smiled knowingly, and didn’t deny it. Martin blushed bright red. He didn’t know how they could talk openly about these things, without any kind of shame - Georgie was physically unable to feel fear, true, but Tim was just… bold, cheerful, where Martin had always been the shy, guilty type. Growing up, he had sat quietly in church and listened to all the condemnations, and yet still thought his private thoughts about David and Jonathan and what had existed between them, which his vicar had just called  _ friendship _ .

David and Jonathan. Jonathan.  _ Jon _ . How long had Jon been speaking with the servant of the Desolation, now? What was happening? Was he safe?

Melanie appeared from the stairs with a clatter of heavy boots.

“Jon says he needs a map,” she announced, urgent. “Some graph someone made? And some clean paper.”

Through the slight panic of sudden movement, Martin hurried to grab the paper, Tim to the drawer where Sasha kept her chart of Spiral manifestations and incidents around London, as Georgie and Sasha emerged from the shelves.

“Jesus, Sasha,” Martin heard Melanie say, approval mixed with candid appraisal in her voice. “You look good.”

He glanced curiously over his shoulder.

The suit jacket that Tim had given her hung a little too far off her shoulders; there was something of an awkward roll of fabric at her waist as she tugged the waistcoat down over it; and either Georgie wasn’t entirely sure how to tie a cravat or she had simply run out of time to neaten it. But she  _ did  _ look good. Sasha was smiling, breathing easily, dressed in Tim’s bright, exuberant colours. It lit her up.

“That’s not the completed version of the graph,” she told Tim, only a little self-conscious as she moved about in her new trousers. Martin doubted that Tim would be getting them back any time soon. “I have it here on my desk, rolled up. What does Jon want it for?”

“He said for the ritual? But I reckon Mrs Nolan just wants proof,” Melanie said, folding her arms uncomfortably. “She thinks he might be tricking her.”

“Tricking her?” Martin blurted. “Why on earth would he be -”

Then he felt his heart stop dead at the agonised scream that echoed from outside.

*

Martin didn’t think he had ever moved so fast: one moment he was standing in the archives, the next he was at the top of the stairs, racing out into the back courtyard with clean paper gripped too tight in his hands. The sun was in his eyes, from this angle, but he didn’t need clear vision to understand at once what had happened: Jon had staggered to one knee, bent over and gasping, while the figure of what Martin could only assume was the landlady stood over him, hands on her hips in satisfaction. For a moment he saw red, and strode forward without thinking.

“No,” he heard Jon wheeze alarmedly, just as someone - Tim, he was fairly sure - managed to catch Martin’s arm and pull him to a halt. “Martin, don’t - it’s - I’m fine, I swear, I can -”

But when Jon shifted minutely, trying to force himself upright, it became fully clear that he was far from  _ fine _ . He was cradling his right hand tenderly against his chest, shielding a raw, red wound that stretched across his palm and up around the back of the hand - in the  _ distinct shape of fingerprints _ . Protective anger and shock swelled up in Martin again; so did his sense of self-preservation, though, and he made no further move toward Mrs Nolan. Instead he fell down beside Jon, reaching out without thinking to give him something to lean against.

Jon’s face was contorted in agony, but he pushed through it, looking up desperately to Mrs Nolan and trying to get his breathing under control enough to speak. Even as he did, he braced himself gratefully against Martin’s soft and steadying chest.

“I can still make you the map,” he promised through gritted teeth, to the unmoving, cruelly beaming woman standing above them. Her eyes were gleaming in delight at his pain, at how his attempts to ignore it only made it worse. “Sasha - could you unroll the - yes, thank you,”

With his thin chest moving rapidly up and down, grip slipping ever so slightly with the delirious sting of the burn, Jon closed the fingers of his left hand around a pen, dipped it in ink, and hesitated holding it above the blank, empty expanse of paper laid before him. Martin felt Jon lean more heavily into him, and adjusted his stance so that Jon could all but collapse without any waver in his support.

“I’ve got you,” he promised, and meant it.

Jon’s eyes blinked closed. When he opened them again, his vision was filled with the otherworldly, fierce power of the Ceaseless Watcher, eagle-eyed with knowledge that was not rightfully his own, intense and uncaring. It sent a shudder through Martin every time. He wished that he could tell himself that  _ this  _ was not truly Jon, that this was some other creature which his friend occasionally conjured - but it was the power of the Eye that had saved him, had saved Sasha and Melanie, and which Martin could only presume had saved Jon himself more times than he could ever understand. This ability was a part of him, no matter how awful.

He began to draw, beginning with what looked at first to be a map of London, but which then spread, overlapping, turning in on itself over and over. Some of the locations that Jon marked with circles or crosses were places that Martin recognised, but as he ran the pen over them again the ink spilled and ran, forming its own patterns, its own new lines over those already marked. The amount of liquid on the page should have left it an unreadable black blot, but instead in the iridescence glimmering under noon sunlight Martin could make out an entrancing, spiralling, dancing pattern, which he felt that he could almost fall inside.

Martin had been staring too intensely into the ink to know how much time had passed, but eventually Jon stopped, shakily lowered his pen, and blinked away the buzzing power of the Eye. As he did, he seemed to suddenly remember the pain he was in, and winced in an effort to relieve it without disturbing the map.

“Here,” he said, voice as firm as he could make it, looking up to Mrs Nolan. Like the rest of them, she was staring rapt at the paper, and startled to be addressed.

As though wary of what might be a hazardous substance, hesitated to pick it up. She carefully held it only at the very edges of the page, keeping her fingers far away from the ink.

“Don’t think about it,” Jon instructed her, strained but very certain of himself. “Don’t hesitate, or try to make sense of it. Just follow the map, and it’ll lead you where you need to go.”

With a visible effort, the landlady tore her eyes away from the drawing.

“Foolish little creature as you are, you fulfilled your end of the bargain, Archivist,” she said, slowly. “And I’ll uphold mine.”

She turned and walked away to do her work - and Jon, much to Martin’s astonishment, lurched to his feet and tried to stumble back toward the Institute. The others all rushed to intervene.

“Whoa, Jon -”

“What are you doing?!”

“Jon, you can’t -”

He shook off the tentative hands flitting about him, shoulders hunched protectively around his injured arm, eyes wide and wild, face taut with pain.

“L-Leave me alone, I -  _ ah _ , I can deal with it, j-just, let me look after it, I’ll be fine -”

The faces of the others, in the glimpses Martin caught of them, were distressed, pale; but he couldn’t allow himself to look away from Jon, from the expression on his face as he tried desperately to stay calm over the horrific, open, blistering wound on his hand. Softly, he touched Jon’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

“What are you talking about?” he blurted. “I’ll care for it, Jon - only me. Let me look after you, for today, please. Someone should.”

Jon held his gaze for a long moment, in something like confusion.

“Fine,” he conceded, weakly. “Alright.”

The others could stay out here or go down into the archives, Martin didn’t care. He was focused wholly on Jon, on helping him walk as gently as he could, cradling him against his side as though he could shield him from the world that way.

“Tell me if I jostle your hand.”

“Yes,” Jon acquiesced, quiet and drained. Martin didn’t know where he was taking them, not really, other than somewhere private; entirely on the spur of the moment, he guided Jon to perch on the stairs up into the body of the Institute.

“I had to,” Jon protested quietly, against a charge no one had made. “I didn’t, d-didn’t see another way…”

Martin nodded comfortingly, though he didn’t understand, and allowed his voice to be openly tender.

“Wait here, Jon. I’m just going to get some water and bandages, alright?”

Jon swallowed and nodded mutely. By the time Martin returned - grateful that someone had, at some point, stashed a cloudy glass bottle of liniment alongside the medicine box at the Institute's front desk - he had mustered himself slightly, but he looked no more certain of what was happening to him or how he should react.

“You shouldn’t have to do this,” Jon blurted. “I’m sorry, I - I heal faster than is normal, anyway, the stab wound closed over already, you don’t  _ have _ to -”

“I want to.” interrupted Martin, softly. “I want to know that you’re not hurt. I want to help you feel safe.”

He dipped his handkerchief into the water, then began as gently as he could to wash the edges of the wound - the cloth would be unusable, after this, but that was an easy sacrifice to make. Jon twitched a little, lips pressed tight, but made no noise of hurt. When he seemed to be on the brink of objecting to being cared for again, Martin shook his head.

“Please, Jon. Please believe me. You deserve this.”

Very carefully, he started to apply the ointment that he had found. Jon gritted his teeth and stared at the floor. It wasn’t healthy for him to be in such pain without showing it - Martin folded his fingers around Jon’s uninjured hand, smaller and colder than his, for Jon to squeeze if he wished. At this he inhaled sharply, and Martin drew back.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t -”

“No,” Jon stammered, face turning red, fingers lacing quickly with Martin’s before he could fully pull away. “Stay, it’s alright.”

“Th-The ointment must sting.”

“It’s not that.”

Martin flushed and turned his attention to the wound as he started cautiously to wrap it in bandages. Keeping his gaze on the injury was a challenge.  _ There are more important things to look at than Jon’s eyes _ , he instructed himself strictly; they rested on him not with the piercing intensity of Beholding, but with all too human wonder. So close to him, Martin could see flecks of gold in the dark brown of Jon’s irises, the delicate skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion, lined and worn. Jon was wearing his emotions uncharacteristically openly, and those eyes were scrutinising Martin as though he was something precious, mysterious; some unknown gem.

He was as slow in caring for Jon’s arm as he thought he could get away with. Martin told himself that it was because he was being careful with what must be an appallingly painful burn, and not just for the selfish chance to hold Jon close, just for once, and protect him.

They were both silent as he finished caring for the injury, reluctantly forcing himself to let go of Jon’s left hand so that he could tie off the bandages. Shakily, he tried to give Jon a smile.

But Jon didn’t smile. There was a serious tilt to his brow as he raised his undamaged hand to Martin’s face, the pads of his fingers gentle and reverent against his cheekbone. Martin’s breath caught, and Jon slowly leaned up and laid a kiss at his temple, like a worshipper.

“Thank you,” Jon whispered.

Then he stood, gave Martin one more lingering, regretful glance, and walked back out toward the door. It felt final.

And Martin’s eyes brimmed over with shocked tears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Martin's self-worth problems and continuing association with the Lonely  
> \- Jon's self-worth problems and self-sacrificial behaviour  
> \- Child neglect and emotional abuse by Martin's mother  
> \- Minor internalised homophobia  
> \- (Cont. previous chapter) burn injury
> 
> There is a line in here taken almost verbatim from a 14th century Byzantine Romance that I'm studying, and I bet anything you can't guess what line it is.
> 
> EDIT 05/03/2021: @yallbitter mentioned in a bookmark Let Tim Wear A Dress. they probably won't look back and see this, and he's not in a dress (sorry) but it did make me realise I had drawn a Victorian Tim and never uploaded it.


	21. The Great Twisting, Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Through the breaking cracks in space they come apace a thousand faces....?_

At the entrance of the Institute, looking out onto the street, Jon hesitated. To his mundane eyes they looked as they should, as they always did: utterly ordinary, rough cobblestones dark and worn and muddy, walls scuffed and stained with coal dust. But he Knew that for hours they had been gradually twisted into something other than what they seemed to be. His senses were lying to him. There was no safety beyond this door. To take one step forward would be to leave the shelter of his own domain, and to willingly throw himself into the jaws of delusion.

But to watch and do nothing would be worse.

Just a few feet away were Melanie and Georgie, frozen, standing out in the road; they must have wandered outside for a breath of air, he thought, or perhaps following Melanie’s second sight, curious as to the progress of the Great Twisting. And now they were entrapped in it. Their hands were entwined - too tight, their knuckles white - and neither moved but to breathe. The breeze was stirring their dresses in two different directions, he noticed, and the flyaway hairs escaping from Georgie’s bun floated upwards. Melanie, whose head was angled toward the Institute, was staring sightlessly through him, mouth slightly open in horrified awe. Whatever was happening to them - or whatever they believed to be happening to them - he couldn’t just leave them to suffer it. Not to mention that the part of him which served the Eye couldn’t ignore this mystery, waiting to be unravelled: it was his prerogative to  _ understand _ , to unpick secrets. He didn’t have a choice.

Jon took a deep breath and stepped out onto the street.

And felt reality buckle beneath him.

*

No one had asked Tim to be a lookout, but, still, he had thought it couldn’t hurt. He had been made into a servant of the Eye, right? He was probably supposed to  _ watch _ .

It was too quiet, too peaceful in here, despite the fact that the stress in the archives had reached a fever pitch. Something wasn’t right.  Restless, he wandered upstairs, and paused at what he knew to be a harmless section of the library to perch idly on a windowsill.

The window in question was not entirely clear. Its glass was fine enough, but not perfect, and the pane that Tim had his face almost pressed up against was subtly misshapen by faint warps and bubbles. When he shifted worriedly in his seat, he happened to glance through a particularly distorted section, and all of a sudden, he understood.

Through that twisted glass, he could see the streets turning, rising and falling like stormy seas, discovering new and impossible angles on which to bend, darting up like slobbering tongues to lick hungrily at any poor soul still out there. A tall man with a head of blonde curls who attempted to run was enveloped by the buildings around him, which drooped down to embrace him as his body melted and fused against them, and a black woman with a friendly face and a brightly-coloured dress evaporated into a swirl of electric colours emanating from the shop signs and windows, usually dulled by London smog and dirt, but now somehow lighting up from within.

Eyes wide, Tim froze, momentarily too stricken with horror to respond. And then he saw Georgie and Melanie step outside, and felt his heart drop to the pit of his stomach. When he looked through the unwarped section of the glass, the streets still looked normal, the blonde man braced against the wall and the woman in the colourful dress collapsed on the pavement, both hysterical with fear but unharmed - but whatever they had experienced, Melanie and Georgie clearly felt it too, because they stumbled over perfectly flat land, desperately steadying themselves as though waves were rolling beneath them. They grabbed for each other, blindly, fumblingly, and came to a terrified halt. If he looked through distorted glass, he was certain, he would see them twisted, trapped within that nightmare too.

Tim stood so abruptly that he slammed his head against the top of the window. He needed to get to the others, to warn them:  _ now, it’s happening now, the damn spiralling armageddon. _ But when he opened his mouth to curse no sound came out, no noise at all but distant, half-familiar music: the whistling howl of a calliope. Or… perhaps he had yelled after all, and misheard himself? He couldn’t remember, couldn’t muster the energy to figure out the difference. Tim tried to call out for someone, fighting his rising confusion and fear - nothing, still, but the music, to the same rhythm as the words he had tried to use. It was getting louder. If whatever strange instrument it emanated from was getting closer, he even more desperately needed to get out of the library, find his friends, help them: Martin, who was capable of protecting himself but shouldn’t have to be alone doing it; clever Sasha, the best person Tim could think of to survive the end with; Jon, unbelievably powerful but also  _ hurt _ ; Melanie, Georgie, already out there, in the midst of it. And Tim didn’t want to caught on his own here either, of course not.

He had to brace himself against the the sill to stand up, head spinning, uncertain if his knees were weak or if the floor had become unstable. It was unnerving, and he had no other thought but to escape it, escape this room, however he could.

Perhaps if Tim had been a little less panicked, he would have noticed that the door through which he had entered the library was not usually situated in one of the bookshelves, nor usually such a garish shade of yellow.

*

Sasha  _ knew _ her chart, had memorised it by now, as much as it was possible to truly memorise a series of lines that did not bend as they should. She had read and appreciated a great deal of mathematical papers on recursions. She had diligently studied to each and every tale contained in the archives on the topic of the Spiral, trawled through all of Smirke’s original writings on its nature and every reply his fellow theorists had given him. She had thought that she  _ understood _ their adversary.

Theory, as it turned out, was very different from practice. And madness resisted by its very nature any attempt to be understood.

Still, Sasha attempted as best she could to navigate, mentally recounting the patterns that she knew - inwards and inwards until left became right, up became down - and she tried to walk against their tide.

She was still in the Institute, at least, even if she had not quite had the presence of mind to stay within the archives as Jon had suggested. That geographical reality was something on which she could rely. The pillars of the grand foyer were as solid as they had ever been, and she could literally, physically cling to them as she tried to make her way back toward the stairs. Sasha had noticed the staring eye motifs concealed within the pompous stone leaves of those Corinthian columns fairly quickly - characteristic of Jonah Magnus’s favoured, rather pretentious, architectural style, as Sasha understood it, though Magnus had not had a great many lone projects before he had become friends with Smirke and his ilk, and turned his attention to the Entities. She could only pray that the power of Beholding inscribed on this place by those eyes would be enough to counter that of Deceit.

As though at a great distance, she could hear a deadened wailing, a sound that ebbed and waned so gradually that she could not say when she had first become aware of it. It could have been an animal’s call, or a human screaming, or a baby crying; sometimes it even sounded like laughter. It seemed to be coming from all angles at once. Maybe someone needed help, perhaps even one of her friends -! She had no idea where the others were, only that they were hopefully still in this building, under Jon’s protection.

By the time she realised she had become entirely focused on trying to listen to and decipher that otherworldly keening, she had lost track of anything solid. Where had the spirals been turning, when she had last tried to step against them, where had the last pillar she had touched to ground herself been? Nothing was solid, anymore. Was that because she had lost track of the concept of solidity, or because the ritual was increasing in momentum, grasping even the Institute tight within its power?

Sasha cast her eyes around, feeling as her hair whipped in the wrong direction, as a skirt brushed her ankles. But she wasn’t wearing a skirt, and the room continued to spin long after she had stopped moving.

_ My name is Sasha James _ , she recited to herself.  _ I am an archival assistant at the Magnus Institute. I am dressed in a suit and trousers. I know who I am. _

The only exception to the unsteadiness was a pair of doors, standing unobtrusively in the wall to the secretaries’ office. There had only ever been one door there. The imposter was identical to the first in all ways, so much so that Sasha’s couldn’t remember which was the original, and which was the invention of the Spiral.

She wasn’t foolish enough to just go straight ahead and open one; she knew what it was. A lie, a false friend, a trap. A question:  _ what lies behind the door? Safety or danger? _

One in two. That was the chance of the door that she chose being nothing more than an ordinary door, the entrance to a room that may or may not have been changed by the apocalypse gathering speed around them. Just a door, and not a mouth. In a sane world, anyway, the chance would have been one in two: perhaps she could no longer trust in statistics.

But the floor was moving beneath her feet, and the crying sound was louder and louder in her ears, and she was nauseous with terror.

So Sasha reached out and opened a door.

*

“Jon!”

He couldn’t have gotten far. Jon was faster than he looked, true, and more determined than anyone would guess - but he was hurt, and Martin could have sworn that he had only walked out of the building a few seconds ago. It couldn’t have been more than a minute until he had run after Jon, he thought, but the knowledge of the ordinary passage of time seemed to have slipped through his mind like sand through splayed fingers.

Jon was  _ injured _ , and Martin had just allowed him to wander away. His tears were no longer falling as they should: viscous and hot, they seemed to burn tracks into his cheek, to fall slowly and shatter against the black greatcoat which Jon had found for him, after Lonely. That was right, he thought. They  _ should _ leave a mark. To visibly show his shame.

“Jon?!”

There were no responses to any of Martin’s shouts - how many times had he called, why couldn’t he remember? - but he kept on crying out, knowing no other possible course of action. The streets had turned from slabs of pavement to dirt, to marble, to grass beneath his feet, and then back to cobblestone again. He hated it. Stupid material for a road, really: it hurt  _ so much _ after a while walking over the uneven surface. Martin could feel blood seeping into his shoes, blisters that had formed and burst unnoticed on his feet.

How long had he been walking?

Jon surely couldn’t have gotten far.

“Jon!”

At least it was no longer raining. Like an oil-slick in lamplight, the rain had cast strange and shifting colours over the streets, burning Martin’s eyes if he looked too close at them. In the puddles - somehow deeper than any ocean and wider than the street itself - he had seen thousands of reflections of Jon: bleeding, dying, laughing, sleeping, yelling, kissing him gently on the side of the head. They weren’t true, they couldn’t have been. None of them carried the same presence as the real Jon, the same power with the Eye. When lightning had forked up sideways from the ground, sending a painful thrill through Martin's bones, he thought he saw something burning far away and had tried to run toward it. Wherever the chaos was, he was sure he would find Jon.

But he had gotten lost somewhere along the way. It was no longer raining… because it couldn’t be, because he was inside. Wait. He was inside?

Martin had not walked through a door, but he didn’t have to: the streets had simply gradually transformed into strange corridors  _ around him _ , looping over and over, shifting imperceptibly from one incomprehensible pattern of wallpaper to another. He must simply have run so far in searching for Jon that he had somehow left the normal world behind. But Jon couldn’t have gotten that far, right? Not so fast, ahead of Martin? How long had he been searching?

The corridors were lined with thousands of picture-frames, as though in a gallery: some were strange, stark shapes that Martin didn’t recognise, others ornate gold, others plain wood, or so dusty and mildewed that he feared to touch them lest they crumble. They contained mirrors, he thought; when he didn’t look directly at them he could see them reflecting the corridor around him. Or maybe they were merely pictures covered b y highly polished glass? Out of the corner of his eye he kept catching glimpses of the images that they contained in more detail, and he could only barely resist the urge to stop and stare into each one. But he knew he shouldn’t stop, he shouldn’t be so selfish or narrow-minded as to get distracted and leave Jon alone, somewhere in this hell, in danger.

He didn’t remember when it was precisely that he lost his resolve not to look, when shouts of Jon’s name became whispers barely breathed from his lips. One moment Martin was still frantically searching, and then the next thing he knew, he was staring into one of the pictures, hugging himself tight over the greatcoat that the air was somehow simultaneously too hot and too cold for him to be wearing, the heavy wool that seemed to weigh him down and hold him still.

His mother’s face sneered back at him from the frame, gaunt and far sicker than he had ever known her, and he understood instantly that the woman in this portrait hated him for leaving her more than she could ever have hated him for staying. She was dead because he had chosen the Lukases and the Lonely over her, and he felt the force of her loathing as a physical blow.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, tearing his eyes away -  _ Jon _ , he had to find Jon, he had to… 

The picture on the opposite wall led somewhere dark and small and cold, and he thought he saw a scrap of red fabric embroidered with poppies, disappearing away beyond the frame:  _ Tim! _ No, no, that was Tim’s waistcoat, but Georgie had helped Sasha dress in it, he remembered, that must be Sasha. She was on the other side of the window, then, and maybe the others with her.

When Martin battered his fists against the glass, it bent inwards, softer than glass could ever be. But it did not break.

“Sasha! Georgie, Tim - what, where -”

Martin’s own voice echoed distantly toward him from the other end of the corridor. The glass, as it turned out, was no window: when he lifted the frame from the wall, there was nothing behind but more wallpaper, somehow now a pattern of animals that Martin wasn’t capable of recognising, when he could have sworn that mere moments before it had been one of interlocking diamonds. When he looked back in what he was fairly certain was the direction he had walked, he could see nothing but this same animal pattern, stretching back into eternity, his own bloody footprints gradually arching off into the walls instead of the floor.

He turned back to the next picture, which did seem for a moment to really be a mirror. But the man it showed him was not quite familiar: curly-haired like Martin, fat and broad-shouldered, but with long sideburns and whiskers, tired eyes, and a wide, ingenuine smile. All at once, he was both sure that he had never seen this man before, and that it was his father.

Realisation struck him so hard that his knees buckled, and he lost any grip he might have had on his purpose.

*

Nothing was safe to touch. Everything was hurting her.

Everything was safe to touch. Nothing was hurting her.

Nothing was safe from her. She was hurting everything.

Melanie was sharp and brutal, or the world was sharp and brutal, or both, or neither.

There was nothing around her that made sense: the streets were spinning, washing in and out like water. Weather wasn’t meant to be so static, nor buildings so moveable. The sun used to be another colour.

Melanie didn’t remember when she had drawn her knife - she hadn’t been aware that she had a knife with her; after she had killed that creature under the bridge and stabbed Jon, she stopped carrying one - but it was in her hand, and that was the only reality she felt she could trust. The past was all a strange blur. Georgie had said that something  _ felt weird _ , and Melanie had been able to see the sunlight-through-stained-glass colour of the Spiral everywhere, and they had noticed that people seemed to be behaving strangely outside the Institute. Walking outside to check had been a mistake. Was Georgie’s hand still in hers?

Something hurt horribly, like shards of glass through her brain. There was blood all over her dress (her blood? someone else’s blood?). Where it touched her skin it felt wrong, freezing cold and prickling with pins-and-needles.

When Melanie screamed, the fractals turning all around her didn’t respond; but she was being baited like a bear by the twisting universe, and screaming felt at least defiant.

She lashed out, and couldn’t tell whether she was in pain or whether she had inflicted it.

*

Georgie was not afraid, but she was utterly lost. As best she could, she tried to stand still, to resist the turning of the ground, to withstand the world around her. If her body was real, it didn’t feel it: she could trust nothing but the presence of her mind, which was lying to her. At one point she had been holding Melanie’s hand in hers. Whatever was clasped in her left hand, if it was still Melanie, was no longer the texture of skin.

Closing her eyes didn’t shut out the colours. 

Through the haze of confusion, she thought she heard a voice, echoing somehow diagonally, calling out for Jon, a voice that reminded her of the Admiral and cold, dewy mist. She screwed her eyes shut even tighter, hardened herself against it: the power that had induced this state was a liar, she was being lied to, and she had to refuse to engage.

Georgie could feel death creeping up her body from the ground, rippling through her organs:  _ death, life, death again, beginning, end, beginning, end _ .She couldn’t remember if she had died in the cellar at sixteen, or if she was still alive. It didn’t make any difference.

The nerves that sang suddenly of pain slashing across her side felt alive, though. The confusing sensation of maybe-Melanie-maybe-not ripped away from her hand, and she choked down a sob, the despairing urge to beg her lover to stay.

Georgie remained perfectly, totally still, as the world convulsed with horror.

*

Following instruction. Jon was very used to that, though it might not have seemed to be in his independent nature: his position as both student and servant had made sure of that, as he had been instructed both for the sake of his education and for the sake of his master’s convenience. He had been well-trained. His lessons had ceased some time around the age of fifteen, when he had begun to work full-time in the archives, but Jon had continued to teach himself, to fill every spare second with books. And he knew how to anticipate Magnus’s orders to the letter (or, before het met Martin he had, anyway). Perhaps that was an aspect of the Eye - or perhaps it was nothing more than conditioning.

Either way, one look at the map that he and Sasha had designed had been more than sufficient for him to recall it perfectly. Magnus had always been smugly pleased with his ability to commit orders to memory, to not ever need them repeated. The Spiral could lie to him all it wanted: Jon still Knew the way, and his footfall was sure and measured on shifting pathways made of nonsense.

The map had never followed any logic, and Jon itched to correct it, to try and make sense of it. But that attitude would only lead him astray. In the domain of the Spiral, heading straight toward something would never take you there. Lines overlapped, inverted, blurred and blended: Jon walked the same paths more than once on his journey, in different directions, frequently glimpsing something tall and hulking behind him whenever he turned, something with long, many-jointed fingers and no kind of structure in its not-body. It wasn’t following him, he seemed to be walking away from it - but of course, what  _ seemed  _ to be happening meant nothing at all. New corridors and structures rose and fell constantly, ever-changing, like blown glass or clay in clever hands. Around him rose a contorted,  _ impossible _ edifice of tunnels, hallways, stairs, falsehoods, all echoing with delighted laughter that, at certain angles, sounded like screaming. Still, Jon knew where to step, which turns to make. 

Jon paid no attention to the laughter, to the lies. He Knew the truth. The mirrors that rose before him didn’t deceive him: he knew his ashen face, his dark brows furrowed with focus, his untameable hair, his burnt hand, and he knew that anything else was false. The sound of Tim calling out for help, of Martin shouting Jon’s name until he was hoarse, of Melanie howling - distractions, lies.

Walking from the outside of the ever-twisting maze inwards, he could begin to understand the architecture of It Is Not What It Is, despite how the act of witnessing the Spiral pushed at the inside of his brain like a headache. Someone, somewhere in the heart of London, had been twisting, grinding away against reality, tearing away at what existed to create an empty space for the Twisting Deceit to fill. And every delusion the Spiral’s victims had ever had was being manifested into part of it.

But Jon was not the only one who knew the map, who understood how to navigate through the labyrinth. He was being rather delicate about it, treading softly over the paths he was certain  _ should  _ be there - even if they were not visible - to reach the centre.

The Order of the Lightless Flame was less cautious. He did not see them appear, nor begin their work. One moment the universe was roiling in the grip of the Spiral -

And the next, Jon stumbled as tongues of ravenous fire began to eat holes in the unreality around him.

*

For a long moment, all the fire brought was panic. Every lost victim found themselves not only maddened, but burning.

Alone - so very alone - within the ever-twisting corridors, faced on all sides by images of those he had loved and who had abandoned him, Martin tried to take deep, sobbing breaths of the curling white mist that had been so cold and so eager to fill his lungs out at sea. But this was not fog: it was hot smoke, and unable to feel the temperature, he choked on it in confused terror.

Tim’s mouth was not his own. It was as though his mind and body were dull machinery, operating beneath the instruction of some uncaring worker: all his running, and crying out, and the strange music that emanated from his mouth were rote actions, performed as though by clockwork. He was helpless to avoid the fire that his not-body did not feel, but which his wide eyes stung with fright of, and he had no new screams.

Melanie whirled as the world around her erupted with new pain, all-consuming and unpredictable, the shock of it vivid lightning-strike blue in the eyes that Beholding had given her. There was no way to fight back, and the fear that brought, fear of helplessness, had her muscles seizing up.

The sudden heat burned greedily through what little air was left, made all the more obvious by how cramped the hallway that Sasha was trapped in had become, how narrowly the walls pressed; pleasant walls, lined with family pictures, wedding portraits, curling and crackling at the edges with invisible tongues of flame. Claustrophobia battled with terror of immediate pain as the fire closed in.

Georgie had no sensation and yet every sensation all at once. She was on fire and she was unharmed. She had yet to be set alight and she had already burnt to a crisp. She was ashes carried by an unnatural breeze and she was damp, smokey firewood, simultaneously. Although she was sure she had not opened her eyes, a glint of firelight against copper caught her attention, and in her peripheral vision, Georgie caught a glimpse of a slim figure, wreathed in flame. For a moment, the creature appeared as an angel of inferno and death, all-powerful - and then it was just a teenage girl again, with auburn hair and sad eyes, and a feline tilt to her head as she stared curiously at Georgie. Then fire surrounded her once more, and the girl disappeared into it.

The imprint of Nolan’s fingers around Jon’s right hand had caught alight, the power and presence of the Desolation too powerful for the mark to resist. The flame that had singed away layers of skin on his hand leapt up again with new fuel, new fear, and Jon stumbled, hissed in pain and tripped. He fell away from the path as the bandages that Martin had so tenderly wrapped burned into cinders.

_ Away from the path. _ Jon’s entire body shuddered with terror. He had lost the route, the map inside his head - Gerry was right, the fire broke concentration, but it had broken  _ his _ and not the Spiral’s. He whirled around, frantically trying to find his feet again.

The ground shifted beneath (around?) him, and this time, without knowing his place on the map, Jon had no way of knowing where to move. He fell - or at least, there was a sensation not unlike falling, or perhaps more accurately a feeling similar to falling in a dream, to his mind lurching suddenly while his body lay still. Jon tumbled through fire, beneath it, around in a spiral, into contortions that his body should not have been able to perform.

After a moment, he found that he seemed to be lying in a heap, body aching unevenly, though he had not hit anything resembling the ground.

_ I Know the truth _ , he told himself.  _ Truth is absolute, objective and subjective. It is my demesne. _ The truth as far as it existed beneath the influence of the Spiral stared back at him, still impossible, still twisting, still incomprehensible.

With his Eyes reeling from attempting to Look and against the nonsensical pull of what was not gravity, Jon clambered to his feet, and glanced up…

...directly into the curious expression of a man made of clay.

Or, not quite made of  _ clay _ ; that would have been the doing of a Stranger, or if of unfired terracotta, perhaps the Desolation. Neither was this man made of skin, bone, and sinew, though, for a human body was not so malleable and ever-changing as his, and this was not a horror of the Flesh. This was an impossibility, an illusion, an actor performing for the joy of tricking Jon’s analytical brain. This creature was comprised of every colour that the eye was capable of divining, and many others that it was not; he was at once every shape and size; he was a part of his background, a limb of it, as well as a separate being; the clay was emanating from his hands, or he was emanating inward from clay. The sculptor was making and unmaking himself. 

_ I Know _ , Jon reminded himself, grinding his jaw hard in the face of the unknowable. His mind had not broken: he was being lied to.

“Gabriel,” he muttered, more a recognition than a greeting. What might have been eyebrows raised on the ever-shifting ‘face’, a sensation - a smell, he thought - of surprise drifting between them. The ‘workshop’ (womb? kaleidoscope? landslide?) churned and danced around them both, leaning toward Jon even as the worker of clay did. He scrambled back.

“Little watcher,” came a voice like a headache, a voice that vibrated in seemingly all of Jon’s bones but those in his ears. It was gently amused but stunningly cold, as though speaking to a pest. “How lost you must be.”

Understanding washed through Jon with a shade of unnameable colour, and he watched as Gabriel twitched with it. 

“The best way to the centre of the Twisting Deceit is to lose your way,” he said, feeling the words like soap bubbles between his teeth.

Gabriel tilted his head curiously - then kept tilting it, inward and inward several full rotations.

“Now,” he said disapprovingly, ‘hands’ still moving in clay, miniscule labyrinths forming beneath his power, ensnaring new victims. “Whatever makes you think that there’s only one centre?”

Without warning, a creature with many-jointed fingers that uncoiled like snakes scooped Jon up and held him aloft, briefly considering him with anatomy splattered at random across and around it. They examined each other for a long second, unsure of who was predator and who was prey - and then those same hands, easily as long as Jon’s body, simply folded him deep inside the puzzle of its architecture. He felt himself disappear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random historical detail but did you know cobblestones were intended as sort of speedbumps? The uneven texture is meant to slow down horses and carts. It's not very effective for this purpose, and kind of sucks in general.
> 
> CWs:  
> \- Canon-typical Spiral content, including:  
> \- Unreality, lost time, warped senses, disassocation  
> \- Visual and auditory hallucinations  
> \- Fire and burning  
> \- Violence  
> \- Sense of powerlessness  
> \- Referenced abuse and neglect (Martin's parents, Magnus's treatment of Jon)  
> \- Being trapped


	22. The Great Twisting, Part II

It was bright inside the Distortion. There was no source of it: no flickering torches, no candles or gas lights, certainly no windows to allow in the Spiral’s twisted version of sunlight. But the walls themselves still shone with the startling brightness of noon, as though illuminated from within. It stung at Jon’s eyes, pulsed with the threat of a migraine on the inside of his skull.

The corridors in which he had found himself were not the garishly patterned wallpaper and picture-frames that he others had described. They were disorientating, but plain and unadorned, walls painted a blinding white, the floor bare, unsteady boards beneath his feet. He had a sinking feeling that he had seen this place before. _Well designed, but cheaply made_ , commented Magnus’s voice in his memory, amused at the way that a younger Jon had tried and failed not to shudder at -

 _The workhouse_ , he realised, all the air leaving his lungs in a single rush of panic. He was _inside the workhouse_. Jon had not been back since the moment he had left with his new master’s heavy hand resting proprietarily on his shoulder, had not even walked past the miserable wrought-iron gates and walled-in yard if he could ever help it, but he remembered every part of the building so clearly: the smell of limewash and sweat, the oppressive terror. Was that fear Smirke’s design, or was it merely Jon’s experience? Or was it the work of the Distortion?

He could feel the geography of this place looping in and in, around and through itself: this was not truly a workhouse, but an endless network of identical and yet ever-shifting tunnels, with no entrance or exit. Every door was merely another trap, another open-ended _question_ , of which the Spiral was so fond. There were no dormitories, no work-floors that he might reach, certainly no exercise yard or street to escape toward. He knew that. And yet, when Jon found himself stumbling in no particular direction through the Distortion, unable to simply stand motionless, he still balked at the sight of a door appearing on the wall before him. The cramped sick-ward in which his grandmother had died, eaten away at by Corruption, could be behind it; or the workshop where Jon and dozens of other small boys had unpicked tarry rope until their fingers bled; or the classroom that had beaten utter silence in the face of authority into him; or the empty storeroom where disobedient children were confined in the dark; or worse of all, _Mister Spider_ , still hungry, still waiting for his dinner guest. _It is polite to knock_. Jon shuddered and stepped back from it.

There was another door behind him when he turned away from the first; there would be another door down every fork, every turn, he was sure. None of them would lead to anything, none contained anything but a promise of further terror. Jon strode past each of them without hesitation, knowing that the corridors would not bring him anywhere either, but given at least a sense of purpose by walking forward, a feeling other than the skin-crawling trauma the Distortion’s chosen set-dressing elicited in him.

“So that’s the plan?” he asked, trying to summon dry anger instead of panic, not bothering to raise his voice to call out to the Distortion. It would be able to hear him, even if he merely whispered. “Keep me here until your ritual is complete, so I can’t interfere?”

“A little too _Beholding_ of you,” hummed a voice consideringly, echoing and distortion through shapes that did not exist. “To talk of _plans_ and _schemes_. But neither of us can help what we are, hm?”

“I am _not_ like you.”

The corridor rolled suddenly beneath his feet, sending Jon careening into a wall, narrowly missing a collision with one of the doors that he so desperately did not wish to open. This one looked like that to Mister Magnus’s study.

“No? You think _your_ victims find it any more fun to be _observed_ than you do to be so lost?”

Jon picked himself up, glaring upwards - though the voice had not come from _up_ , exactly; it could not in fact be said to have come from any direction in particular. Its words had an amused bent.

“Being lost inside you is not what frightens me about this place,” said Jon sharply, far too honestly for his comfort - but what other choice did he have, to fight against a liar? “My memories of these corridors belong to the Mother of Puppets. I don’t fear being lost, I fear being controlled, trapped here as I once was. You’re a parasite, playing with other fears.”

The Distortion’s laughter fell upon his ears like debris of an explosion, and he scowled, resisted the urge to cover them against a sound that seemed to be coming from inside his own head.

“Rich, coming from a servant of voyeurism. Besides: all that can change,” it offered, faux-sweetly.

The world twisted nauseatingly, the walls and the air separating and swirling, like oil mixed with water. Jon clutched at his head, shook it until it throbbed. _I Know the truth_ , he reminded himself, _it is a liar._

“Stop stalling.” he demanded, through gritted teeth.

“To _stall_ requires a sense of time,” objected the Distortion, sing-song. “Such a complicated thing, time. So easy to lose, or waste, or abandon altogether.”

“Answer the question!”

“ _No_ . A straight answer, a plan: these belonged to your world. This is _our_ world, now, little watcher. You will have to become used to the absence of such things.”

“And you don’t want a witness to your grand transformation?” Jon deadpanned. It giggled again, like a thousand tiny knives.

“Important events have been set in motion, watcher, and we thought it best that you should not get to make sense of them, anymore. That little map of yours… very impolite. No more respectful of you than it would be for us to twist the bookshelves of your precious archive into something more _interesting_. Isn’t that a fun thought, though?”

“I think you know that it is not.” he snapped, marching past yet another set of doors - these lining the ceiling above him, with faint music playing from behind each.

“ _We_ don’t know _anything_ ,” it countered. “We are a collection of experiences, contortions of the senses, be they true or otherwise.”

“A lie.”

“Yess _ssssss_ …”

The sibilance rose and fell like some strange, unpredictable tide, jarringly painful on Jon’s teeth, leaving a bitter taste on his tongue.

“We have _plenty_ of witnesses, anyway,” the Distortion went on, unmistakable glee in its otherwise alien voice. “You wandering through us is an extra treat, but we have no need to invite any more of the Eye to our apotheosis. Wouldn’t you prefer to look at your friends than at us, little watcher?”

Before Jon could demand to know what it meant, a door at the other end of the long corridor swung open, briefly revealing -

“Sasha!”

She didn’t hear him. Trapped in a prison of her own mind, a recursive loop of tight walls and expensive, decorative wallpaper, hurtling past the open door as though running from something.

“What are you doing to her?” Jon demanded, compelled - but the floorboards beneath him warped and split, sending him tumbling face-first to the ground again, and interrupting the question. The Distortion was too powerful to be forced to give him any kind of truth, anyway; he had Asked on instinct, not really expecting an answer.

“Human minds,” it said, fondly, predatorily, calling to mind the image of a butterfly caged between fingers, its captor childishly entertained by its frantic panic. “So simple, so focused on one point at one time. How _fun_ it’ll be for you, once all that has changed.”

Still sprawled on the floor, Jon looked up at another door opening on the ceiling above him, showing him another of his assistants. Tim’s eyes were wide with horror, but unseeing; he walked stiffly, struggling with his sense of touch, his own body. This time, Jon didn’t even have time to cry out before the door slammed again - he knew that it would fall on deaf ears, but inaction felt terrible even so.

Jon pulled himself to his feet, barely missing another door as it fell open inches from his face: a cloud of white billowed forth from this one to reveal the faint shape of Martin, all alone, _so totally_ alone. He was calling out weakly for somebody, anybody, his voice rough and quiet, knowing that there was nobody to hear him, nobody to care even if they did. There was guilt in his voice, too, something new, not the old fear that Jon had felt from Martin when they first met inside the Lonely, a horrible new dimension that pricked fresh tears from his eyes, that Jon could almost taste -

The door closed, cutting him off from his friend, jarring him out of his reverie. _You’re not alone, Martin_ , he should have said - selfish, pathetic, hungry for Beholding - the Distortion was right, Jon was just as monstrous, he had no right to judge it even as he tried to stop it.

Was he alone, in trying to stop it, though?

What was it that had stung his eyes? Had that only been Martin’s fear that he could taste?

Through the haze that this place put over the Ceaseless Watcher’s vision, the overwhelming confusion that made it difficult to even think, much less access his power, Jon forced his mind to the vapour that had crept in through the door to Martin’s corridor, to the way that it had smelled. 

The smell of a housefire. Of smoke.

 _The Desolation_ , of course; Jon’s right hand, temporarily forgotten, flared with new agony. Every other scar he had ever gained from the touch of a Dread Power, visible or not, burned too - the knife that the Slaughter had left in his shoulder, the distinct aches of the Buried in his ribs and the Corruption in his lungs, the fingernails he had broken scrabbling to escape the Stranger, the ringing of the Vast in his ears, the puppet-strings the Web had tied around his fingers, the dull cough of the Lonely in his throat, the Dark beneath his eyelids, and the Ceaseless Watcher carved deep into the surface of his eyeballs and onto his tongue. They recontextualised him, proclaimed him in twelve strong voices: _this_ was who he was, not just a scared child lost in an endless workhouse, not just another victim of the Twisting Deceit.

He was the Archivist, conduit of the Eye, He had given himself over to it willingly to escape these corridors before, and he would do so again.

“Stop that.” ordered the Distortion, mild, not distressed.

“What?” he replied, keeping his voice just as falsely light as possible, pressing down his excitement. “Looking, trying to make sense of my surroundings? I can’t help it.”

 _Ceaseless Watcher_ , Jon called internally, _Look through me. See this place in all its impossible truth, allow me to map it again._

“We’ll be able to _help_ you stop, soon,” offered the Distortion, with a chuckle like a brick to the face. “That pretty fire… so helpful, for a moment, but of course we couldn’t just let it continue to burn. All our hard work, up in smoke. You would have liked that, wouldn’t you? Such a shame the flames had to forget their own nature and flicker out. It’s _our_ nature that rules now, and It Is Not What It Is feels no respect for silly little physical laws.”

Jon stuttered, faltered in his steps and his certainty - no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t See outside the Distortion’s corridors, couldn’t tell whether the burning in his retinas was from looking too hard at something incomprehensible, bright with joy in its impossibility, or from looking into the Lightless Flame. Perhaps the Distortion was telling the truth: Gerry had said that fire was a good way to break free of the Distortion’s hold, but that was one occasion, one incidental victim, to whom it had not clung hard. Maybe the Spiral was merely too powerful now to be affected by the efforts of one measly cult, small and poor and unimportant enough to slip beneath most Powers’ notice.

But believing anything the Spiral said would be surrendering to it, and if there was anything Jon had in droves, it was _spite_. He decided that it was lying, that he didn’t believe it, and that the Order of the Lightless Flame was to the best of their ability still setting the mechanisms of its ritual alight, somewhere outside the labyrinth that he had found himself inside. But the Desolation had always been a secondary concern.

Against a liar, it was the truth that was a weapon. He had to Know it, to understand - but the Eye was confused, unable to focus, blinded by the ever-shifting aurora of light and sound and laughter that was the Spiral in its truest form.

Jon steadied himself against the walls, closed his mundane eyes for a moment, and then opened them wide, and Looked. To Know, to summon his power internally, wouldn’t be enough; he would have to call his patron aloud.

“Ceaseless Watcher,” he began, voice deep and serious with the power of Beholding. Around him, the Distortion flexed, throwing him off the wall. It was still laughing, but the laughter felt a little forced, more threatening, now. Jon’s Eyes couldn’t See quite as they should, but they were still open.

“Ceaseles- _agh_!”

“ _Very_ rude,” commented the Distortion, faux-casual, as the walls constricted around him, tumbling him from one end of the corridors to another. Then its tone turned darker, openly dangerous. “You’re in _my_ domain, little watcher. You’re inside _me_. I am not something that the Eye can surveil: I am too large, too ever-changing, for you to Watch. By the time you have Beheld me I will already have become something, somewhere else.”

Jon huffed bitterly, ignored it. Insurmountable odds, yes, he understood that. They wouldn’t prevent him from trying.

“ _Ceaseless Watcher, turn y_ -”

The corridors flipped entirely, twisting and rising with a sickening swell of vertigo, sending Jon flying.

“Why do you try?” wondered the Distortion aloud, content to interrupt him as he got his breath back, tried to scramble upright in corridors that were now beyond even the scope of any kind of physics. “You know the touch of the Eye, all the horrors it can inflict; you don’t want _that_ done to the world, either. For the sake of your master? Loyal little hound, not understanding why its owner kicks it, hm, is that it?”

Jon gritted his teeth, dragged himself upright. The floor was not as it should be, anymore. The wooden boards beneath him were a sort of gelatinous liquid; fine, he perceived that and understood it, accepted it. He didn’t allow its words beneath his skin: Mister Magnus, to whom he owed his entire life, cared for Jon no more than he cared for the filing cabinets in which he stored his statements, Jon was well aware of it, no matter how it stung. He had known that when he set out, and he knew it still.

“Not him, then,” the Distortion agreed. “At least _that_ hell makes sense to you, whereas _this_ one does not. But you’re deluding yourself if you think there’s any other escape from your life with him. Your assistants, perhaps? Now there is a pantomime you’ve been carrying on without ever needing a liar to plant it there. You _truly_ do think of them as your friends, don’t you?”

Jon’s heart leapt in his throat. It cooed at him sweetly, as it continued to throw him about.

“Even if they had been able to see you here, they would not have come to help you,” it assured him smugly. “Always on the outside, staring in, isn’t that how it is with your ever-watchful god? Lonely, isn’t it, lying to yourself that anyone could want you? The _cat_ , now, _he_ wants you, but even he knows better than to look to you for reliable companionship - and such a simple creature, with such selfish needs, he only gave you a second look because you were warm and you had food. That’s how life works, Jon. Isn’t that what they taught you here?”

The corridors shifted, took on the wood-varnish smell and dark walls of the workhouse’s chapel, the stone floors that had once been cold against Jon’s knees.

“ _You are the dregs of society_ ,” echoed the voice of a priest that Jon hadn’t realised he remembered. “ _You will only ever be wanted in as much as you can be useful._ ”

“Strange to think that you could lie to yourself so thoroughly, that you could make themselves believe it was any different with them. _Martin_ needed you for a way out, _Sasha_ too, and before that she and _Tim_ and _Melanie_ needed you for the Institute, _Georgie_ for a way to research the wolf. Mere politeness, that’s all they showed you, and you were pathetic enough to fix upon it. Can you trust the way you understood those memories, little watcher? Or did you really manage to fool yourself that they _liked_ you? Since you’re useless, powerless in here, why would they even glance toward you?”

Jon hesitated, the sinking feeling in his chest overwhelming. Their names sounded so wrong in the Distortion’s not-mouth: it chewed over the syllables and spat them out disdainfully, and all the while the same people it hissed about were trapped somewhere inside it, spiralling into neverending falsehoods at its behest.

Jon’s personality was abrasive, eccentric, he knew that. There wasn’t much he could do to help it, and in all honesty he rarely tried, hadn’t bothered to for so long before Magnus had begun to hire assistants for him. Jon had not felt the need to be wanted: there was nothing but disappointment in that desire. Besides, he had a duty to fulfil, and he was doing his best toward it, no matter his hesitance, no matter Gerry’s warning that he should run.

The Eye had turned away from the Distortion, toward Jon: he saw himself, all his oddities, all his flaws, his small frame, his weakness. Who was _he_ to counter an apocalypse? To think that he was capable of taking the entire weight of the world on his thin shoulders?

But something was wrong - something about his doubt rang false.

He _knew_ what it felt like, to be wanted only for the services that he could provide. Jon, not always willingly, could break open the heads of those around him and look inside: he was intimately familiar with the feeling of being nothing more than property, utility, and it did not emanate from his assistants, his _friends_. His right hand burned with the reality of fire - and it had been soothed by large, gentle hands, hands that had held him after a nightmare, a caring face that had allowed him to brush a feather-light kiss against it.

He might not understand why, but he knew that he was loved. He knew it with utter certainty.

“You’re lying,” Jon said, beneath his breath. “That’s a lie.”

The Eye shifted, turning back toward the spiralling tower of corridors, tunnels, fractals that surrounded them. And Jon’s eyes opened: he was more powerful, more connected to Beholding’s power than he had ever been before, alight and aloft with endless vision.

“A sure lie,” he repeated, voice thrumming with that same power. “A genuine untruth, a fixed point in all the madness, a certain fact on which to anchor.”

Around him, the Distortion shifted and shuddered, throwing open doors all around him, attempting not to entrap him any longer, but now to expel him, to toss him out before he could unmake it from the inside out. But it was too late for that. Jon had taken hold of the lie, had it in the Eye’s grasp: a loose thread which could unravel the entire tapestry if pulled.

“ _Ceaseless Watcher_ ,” he called, the incantation rising naturally to his lips. “ _Turn your gaze toward this lie, this golden strand of falsehood. Take it into your power, Know it, follow its turns and curves and twists and knots, comprehend that which cannot be made sense. Let it disentangle the knot that the Worker of Clay has made. Unweave it now, its fear and its power and its deceptions, its laughing mouths and its hidden ones, its many doors. Take all that it is and all that it is not and all that it pretends to be._ **_It Is Yours!_ **”

There was fire all around him: the Lightless Flame had noticed the Distortion’s distress, perhaps, or in its focus on Jon it had stopped whatever it had been doing to contain them - or perhaps it had simply been lying, and had never been able to suppress the flame at all. The corridors began to catch and burn, wood and wallpaper curling away as though cringing in fear, trying to escape.

“ **_I Know You. And I Know The Way Out._ **”

As clearly as when he had the map held out before him, Jon saw his escape route, pictured it in his mind. And a door at the end of his corridor slammed open as he began to walk toward it.

The Distortion tried all it could to hinder him: the architecture bucking and twisting, doors slamming like gnashing jaws, the reflections of his hands as seen in bright brass handles reaching out from them to grab at him. But Jon Knew who and what he was, now, and he knew how to navigate this unreality as it fell apart.

Outside, the incomprehensible horrors that Gabriel’s hands had wrought were transforming one by one back into clay, and dissolving into the ground. The air was filled with mind-shattering screams, as the servants of the Spiral howled their displeasure at the failure of their ritual. Inside one of the Desolation’s gleeful bursts of fire, Gabriel’s molten skin fired and hardened: for a brief moment, the Worker of Clay seemed nothing more than a malformed statue, expression frozen in a rictus of terror and agony. But in the heat and panic at the centre of the ritual the brittle stone was quickly shattered, scattering the man who would have been king of a ruined, insane world as flakes of dust into the wind.

The tunnels began to collapse. Gravity had, for that immeasurable span of time, been enthralled to the will of the Spiral, but now it remembered its place, and it seized at its rightful power.

The floor that Jon was standing on disappeared back into the impossibility from which it had been conjured, and he was thrown back toward the ground.

There was no way that a person could withstand such a fall and survive - and he didn’t.

So Jonathan Sims died: eighteen years old, broken and battered, in a maze outside reality, watching as the world retched and folded back into its natural shape. He had won.

His weak and watery eyes slipped shut.

*

And then they opened on another place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> (Largely continued from the previous chapter)  
> CWs:  
> \- Canon-typical Spiral content, including:  
> \- Unreality, lost time, warped senses, disassocation  
> \- Visual and auditory hallucinations  
> \- Fire and burning  
> \- Abuse, including children subject to forced labour and corporal punishment  
> \- Self-worth issues and emotional manipulation  
> \- _Temporary_ major character death


	23. Outis

The body lay cold and limp. Any physician would have pronounced it long dead, for its chest was utterly still - but its eyes still moved beneath their lids in dreams.

*

Jon blinked, his thoughts slow, as though behind a haze. There was a distant pain in his head. It shouldn’t have been possible. He couldn’t quite remember why, but for some reason, he was certain that he should not have a head to ache.

Above him stretched an endless night, unmarred by light pollution, devoid of stars. Jon might have assumed under any other circumstances that London smog or storms had choked off the city from the atmosphere, or that he had simply found himself some street so derelict that no streetlamps were lit. But this sky was a perfect, velvety blackness, utterly empty. The universe he stared up into was only void, its every celestial body burned to ash millenia ago, every planet long silent.

It was dead.

With arms that he could not feel, Jon pushed himself shakily to sit upright, unable to tear his eyes away from the empty sky. The only sensation in his body was that of extreme cold lancing up painfully through where he touched the ground, far colder than ice. This ground was not the paved road that he had expected, which he was sure had broken his body: the surface beneath him was fleshy, giving slightly beneath his unthinkingly clutching fingers, a mess of long, uneven shapes like the gnarled and twisted roots of an ancient tree. Though there was no light, somehow Jon could still see. Dreamlike, he felt himself glance down.

He lay atop a network of black, freezing veins, which snaked thickly over a desolate landscape, strangling this dead, bare world and carpeting over every inch of it. Some veins were as wide as his arm, others no thicker than a blade of grass, others still as large as a tree trunk, and they gently pulsed and slowly squirmed, like the matrix of some alien being, a living thing. And yet, nothing could be further from _living_.

Jon could move here, see, think, breathe as if by rote - even as he Knew that there was no life, no light, no warmth, no air. He wondered if he would remain in this place forever, and if so, if he could endure such a state.

But he was not alone. With only the most distant twinge of surprise, Jon noticed that feeling he knew so well, the discomfort of being watched by a supernatural entity. He turned his head slowly toward its source - the staring creature had no eyes to meet, however. It gazed out from nothing more than the hollows of an ancient skull, obscured in the shadow of a moth-eaten robe, hood drawn up; the bones were older than Jon could know or even imagine, so brittle that the slightest touch would have shattered them into dust. The skull was the same as that which had grimaced out at him from Gerry’s tarot cards. It did not have to carry a scythe for its identity to be quite clear.

Death walked toward Jon until it stood directly before him, its movements easy and natural, despite how the robe contained nothing more than a time-worn skeleton and thick, powerful terror. Then it bent down, and offered him a hand.

Jon could only accept, his numb hand closing around Death’s icy bones, and allow himself to be pulled to his feet. For a long while he simply stared, and Death waited stoically.

“Hello,” Jon said, his soft voice echoing strangely upon nothing at all. Absent-mindedly, Jon Looked straight at Death, and spoke on the whispered advice of the Eye.

“My name’s Jon. I’m Georgie’s friend.”

The black robes soaked through with blood and then melted away, leaving in Death’s place a young boy in a neat but threadbare suit. He wore a very grave expression on an otherwise sweet young face, his dark skin grey without life, limbs gangly in a way that said he would one day have been tall, though he stood shorter than Jon. When Jon looked at him out of the corner of his eye, the boy disappeared, leaving only a child’s skeleton wrapped in a white sheet. This was one of the corpses that Georgie had seen in the undertakers’ cellar, he realised: the boy who had waved to her.

Was this where she had gone in those paralysed months?

“I’m Oliver,” replied the boy, with the faintest of greeting smiles.

Perhaps Jon should have felt afraid of him. But in truth, he _felt_ very little at that moment, and he could sense no malice in Oliver, only a neutral, watchful patience.

“Am I dead?” he asked, still quite calm

Oliver seemed to mull it over.

“Part of you. But you don’t belong to me.”

Old dread swelled up in Jon; the roots beneath him shuddered in excitement, as though feeding on his fear.

“I belong to Jonah Magnus,” he stated, his non-existent mouth suddenly dry. It was a fact he knew well, and yet which always tasted poisonous whenever he said the words aloud.

But Oliver shook his head.

“You’re a servant of Beholding, just the same as him, but _he_ is mine and _you_ are not. He’s too afraid of the End.”

Jon tilted his head. It seemed a stupid question - his fear was dulled here, though, and so he could not tell for himself.

“Is death frightening?”

“Death isn’t anything. It just is.”

They weren’t actually at the very End, he understood, taking another long look around. This place was the final gasp, the penultimate moment of the world, not the eternal nothingness that would follow: a liminal space. The actual emptiness of death was not something that Jon was capable of comprehending. Georgie had caught a glimpse of it, and the totality of Terminus had consumed a part of her, swallowed up so much of her fear that nothing else could ever scare her, not in comparison to what she knew was the cosmic horror of inevitable, unavoidable, empty, doom.

It was all fascinating, to Jon. The certainty that he would not be able to understand the true void did not dissuade him at all from wishing to _try._

“That’s what makes you different to Jonah Magnus,” agreed Oliver, to what Jon was fairly sure he had not actually said aloud. “He’s powerful with the Eye, but he’s a feast for the End. You know that, Jon: the more afraid you are of something, the more you tempt it in. Everyone fears death, one way or another. But some can imagine nothing worse, and will turn to any evil to avoid the end of life. Magnus is of that kind, and so, no matter what he does, we will claim him one day. Like most things.”

Jon was beginning to catch on.

“But… not like me?”

“Not necessarily, no. Right now you’re stuck in-between, with me. _I_ belong here, but you, you’re…”

Oliver squinted, trying to figure out how to phrase it, looking like nothing more than a child contemplating a particularly difficult puzzle. In his peripheral vision, however, Jon could still see a skull resting over Oliver’s young face. Eventually, he said,

“You’re not quite human enough to die, but you’re still too human to survive. You’re not strong enough to escape the End, but you’re too strong to allow it to consume you. Your spirit is here, and your body has no pulse, it’s not breathing, but yet you dream.”

“Perfectly balanced,” Jon murmured. “Like Smirke wrote about.”

“Like you’re standing on a knife edge,” agreed Oliver.

Jon glanced again at the black sky, the corpse roots spreading out beneath their feet. He had balanced upon an impossible edge before; he had spent years of his life appeasing his master.

“Mister Magnus can’t touch me here,” Jon pointed out. “Nothing can, none of the Entities. I can’t feel the marks they’ve left upon me, or the Watcher’s gaze. I’m free of them. For once, nothing hurts.”

Oliver’s steady stare held no judgement, but a sort of understanding that made Jon hesitate. He had been touched by unnatural things too; he had known the corpse roots even before his death, Jon could sense it, and he had chosen to embrace them. The urge to demand Oliver’s statement rose inside him, almost overwhelmed him - but the words, the compulsion, died on his tongue with his lips pressed shut. Here, he was as free of hunger as he was of pain. There was no need for him to feed the Eye.

“I could stay here,” Jon said quietly. “With you.”

“You could,” shrugged Oliver, apparently unbothered either way. “But time is still passing outside.”

Jon blinked.

“What?”

“It’s been days while we’ve been talking.”

A twinge of panic; the roots shifted again, hungrily, but Jon felt suddenly grounded by that type of fear, pulled back to the reality from which he had come, out of this halfway-space.

“There are people waiting for you,” Oliver told him, tolerantly. What use had the Grim Reaper to urge him toward death faster, after all? Even if Jon would not come to the End at the end of a human lifespan, he would by the end of the universe.

“I can feel the weight of their thoughts about you, their mourning and their hope. They’re afraid that you’re dead.”

One last time, Jon cast his eyes curiously around the dead world, the lightless and lifeless landscape. Then he looked back to Oliver, seeing the skeleton very clearly now.

Far away from him, his heart began to weakly beat again.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as sincere as he could be in this numb state.

“It’s not a gift,” said the skull impassively. “Only a message.”

Jon felt Eyes open along his every limb, within his every organ, as he surrendered any last shred of humanity tying him to mortality, and gave himself over to Beholding entirely. Even while the End still touched him, he surged with the power of watching, following, understanding, revealing, knowledge too terrible to know and yet too powerful to forget.

*

The body took a deep, shuddering breath, as though coming spluttering up from below water.

Impossibly, miraculously, monstrously, Jon _woke up_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yknow, because outis means nobody and death is nothing? and it's the Greek equivalent of Latin 'nemo', and Oliver died at Point Nemo? I overthink this.
> 
> CWs:  
> \- Canon-typical End content (see: ep.29)  
> \- Character deaths: neither actually passed away, but both Oliver Banks and Jon have 'died'  
> \- Environmental death  
> \- Referenced abuse


	24. Coronation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry

Everything was too sharp, too new. The dust-and-paper smell of the archives, the dim gaslight, the chill air. Jon found himself overwhelmed, shaking - but also smiling, happier to have all his senses reeling than he ever could have imagined.

He was alive, to some degree. He was within his own centre of power. He was  _ back _ .

It was like appreciating the absence of a pain he had grown accustomed to, an old ache finally relieved: the ability to feel the softness and the comfort of the pallet and blankets it turned out he was lying on was strange, profuse bliss. When he raised his eyes, he could see discarded clothes, a flask, the remains of someone’s lunch, and a haphazard pile of statements. The others must have found him and brought him here to recover - but, god, his friends, were they alright? He had stopped the ritual, yes, but he had still ended up in danger, and perhaps they had too… 

Jon craned his neck to look around - though, now he was moving, he felt stronger than he imagined he should be, probably able to stand. Oliver said he had gone  _ days _ at least without food or water, without blood pumping through his veins or air in his lungs. He felt fine despite it, only unsettled. If anything, he thought his eyesight might actually be  _ better  _ than before, preternaturally crisp and clear. The room was empty. He was dressed only in the same shirt and trousers as he had been wearing inside the Spiral; there was even a glimmering rainbow stain, now devoid of any power, marring the grey material over his calf to prove it. The rest of his clothes were folded neatly on top of his shoes by a desk, a single tidy spot in a sea of abandoned chaos: from this angle, he could see dirty bowls and cups, half-read statements and scrawled research, another makeshift bed, a shawl he recognised as belonging to Melanie, left cast carelessly over Martin’s coat. They seemed to be living here, keeping watch, waiting for him. Jon swallowed a lump of emotion at the thought of such care.

But  _ where  _ were the others?

He Knew instantly that there was no one else anywhere in the archives. It was only just evening, as far as he could tell - no sunlight ever breached the basement, but there wasn’t the bitter cold of deep night - and the rest of the Institute should be empty, or close to empty, its employees probably still recovering from whatever atrocities they might have endured during the Great Twisting.

Curious, but not yet alarmed, still overwhelmingly glad to be alive, Jon Looked through the building.

Only to recoil at what he saw.

There was a presence in the Institute: it belonged here, it was at home here, powerful, but the power that it held over him was not that of the Ceaseless Watcher. This man owned him in a very mundane and yet unbreakable way. His pace as he made his way down the stairs was seemingly urgent, but the expression Jon Saw on his face was as haughty and unreadable as ever.

Jon didn’t have time to react, to do anything but freeze, stare blankly forward in bone-deep dread.

With glassy composure hiding any hint of feeling or purpose, Mister Magnus walked calmly into the archives; he was utterly poised, unperturbed, as he paused just over the threshold to smoothly adjust his already-perfect suit cuffs. The serenity of his actions did not fool Jon in the slightest. When his master looked down his nose to make eye contact, it was like a dagger through his frightened mind, like cruel, cold fingers combing through his thoughts.

“No hysterics,” Magnus warned him, before he could even begin to truly panic, implied threat deafening in each soft word.

As ordered, Jon clamped down on the urge to run, to hide. But without acquiescing to his terror, he had no idea how to react - so he remained on the floor, stiff, scared, staring.

“Get up, boy.”

Jon pushed himself to stand on fawn-trembling limbs, shoulders up around his ears.

“Get dressed.”

His eyes flicked briefly to his pile of clothes: but, no, he did not feel so naked in shirtsleeves that he jumped immediately to cover himself, and his instinct to mollify this man with deference was not so great that he could force himself to move, to put himself in the vulnerable and humiliating position of fumbling with his suit before eyes that watched with the sole aim to terrify. He didn’t move. Magnus raised a single disdainful eyebrow at this small resistance, full of disdain.

“Very well, then.  _ Follow me _ .”

The words were laden heavy with compulsion. That ability extracted truth, not compliance: Magnus had not asked a question, there was nothing there that Jon could be forced to answer, but that was not the point. It was intended as a power play, a reminder that Magnus had been favoured of their patron long before his apprentice’s birth, and that in the service of the Eye, Jon was nothing more than an upstart brat. It was a reminder that he had no other choice but to obey.

So Jon followed him.

They walked, to his considerable surprise, not up into the body of the Institute proper, but further into the archives. Jon knew each and every corridor of his own domain, of course, but he had never had much interest in this most distant one. It was a narrow, snaking thing at the back of the building where they sometimes kept discredited statements. The most that he could have said of it was that it was peaceful, perhaps, but Jon had little free time to waste on peace.

Magnus gave no word of explanation. He reached out and pulled an empty bookshelf away from the wall, which swung open too smoothly, too silently, on disguised hinges kept well-oiled, and revealed a simple wooden door set back in the wall, sturdy and unmarked. Jon’s brows furrowed - he had had no idea that this was here, had never thought to look. The key that Mister Magnus withdrew from his pocket turned easily in the door’s lock, as though this was a perfectly normal, everyday action. And behind the door stretched out a strange, empty space, a set of stone stairs leading down into what seemed to be a long tunnel made of the same material. Chill, musty air drifted up out of the dark toward them; not the empty black of the End’s dead planet, nor the rich, threatening black of the Divine Host’s Dark, but a simple gap, a blind spot. He could not See inside, Jon realised, with a jolt of discomfort. No wonder he had never discovered this: whoever had made this tunnel had taken great lengths to occlude it from the Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze.

Jon flinched at the hand that landed on his shoulder, gripping meaningfully too tight through the thin material of his shirt.

Magnus’s blank expression was uncompromising, though he said no words. Powerless, Jon swallowed his fear, put one foot in front of the other, over and over, and walked into the unnatural stillness. Once they were inside, Magnus let go of him, as though in distaste; but Jon barely noticed, too stunned by the absence of the Eye, so linked in his mind with the sensation of being trapped, or dead.

Well-practiced and efficient, Magnus lifted a candlestick apparently set ready at the entrance of the tunnel and lit it, then closed the door behind them with a heavy  _ thunk _ . He gestured forward coolly.

“Walk.”

With a little hesitancy now, Jon did as he was told, thoughts moving a thousand miles a minute to try and piece together what was happening - and more importantly, why. Perhaps his master had finally decided to be rid of him; though for a man of such means, there must surely be easier methods? He could have had Jon’s throat cut and his body dumped in the river, or if he didn’t want it known that his servant was dead, dragged away to a country estate and buried there. But then, perhaps there some special method of destroying avatars hidden below London, some unspeakable nightmare that Mister Magnus could use to be certain he would be gone forever - Jon had enough expertise with the Entities to conceive of what that could entail, and he felt tremors running up and down his body at the thought, even as his master’s pace increased and he had to hurry to keep up. It might not be anything of the sort, though. Maybe there was an element of the Great Twisting that he had missed, failed to eliminate? That would certainly explain Magnus’s apparent urgency, if Jon was being directed to complete a duty he had unknowingly neglected.

_ Or maybe _ , whispered a dark, foreboding voice inside him,  _ he heard you say aloud that you didn’t care about the Watcher’s Crown, that you had no intention ever to complete it, and you are being punished for such disrespect. _

The possibility was awful, but something he could at least apologise, atone for. Not knowing was far more unbearable than the deeply-entrenched fear of asking impertinent questions, so Jon anxious mustered himself to speak, and opened his mouth.

Anticipating the interruption, Magnus grabbed him by the wrist and began to walk even faster, pulling Jon forward so abruptly that he stumbled in the dark. Though he had only a simple, flickering light, and the many-branching tunnels turned and separated at seemingly random intervals, Magnus was utterly certain in his trajectory, unaccepting of any hesitation, his resolve unshakeable and his grip on Jon’s arm like iron.

The dull pain of the Desolation’s burn being jostled was nothing to the ever more urgent worry Jon felt. Even when he was small and ignorant and afraid, he had never actually needed to be  _ dragged _ anywhere, always unfailingly dutiful. Was this so much worse than anything else he had been forced into?

Jon’s mind whirled, frenzied, as he attempted to decipher the clues around him. Reaching for the Eye gave him no more vision deep within the tunnels as it had at their entrance, but it did at least reveal that these subterranean passages were not, as they had initially seemed, empty of fear: rather,  _ every  _ fear had a presence here, all equal, all neatly ordered, and in symmetry they amounted to nothing. Balance, measure,  _ Smirke. _ this network of tunnels had all the hallmarks of Robert Smirke’s theories, they had to have been his doing.

Then this was why Magnus had decided to move his Institute to London? This was why he had chosen the edge of the Thames, Millbank specifically? Jon had always assumed that his master had selected the location merely because of its proximity to his home - but such a wealthy man could surely purchase a townhouse anywhere in the city, and Jon knew for a fact that Mister Magnus’s current residence had not been occupied very long before he had moved Jon there. That was the only order of events that made sense: he chose the house because it was near to the Institute, and the Institute because it was above the tunnels. God only knew what horrors had been visited upon the work crews to keep them quiet.

Something had happened down here. Something terrible, something engineered by Magnus for the Eye, before he devised whatever plan he had enacted through Jon. And in the culmination of that plan, something terrible was happening here again. He was about to be made its catalyst.

Jon felt the gut-punch alarm of the realisation helplessly. In some ways, he had already known it, had accepted that he would have to do  _ something _ in the payment of his debt. The thought occurred to him, then drifted away, and as he continued to be dragged deeper underground, his mind fixed upon something else entirely.

_ You tried to feed me to the wolf _ , Jon kept thinking, body limp and unresisting in his master’s bruising grip even as his head filled with private mutiny.  _ You tried to feed me to the wolf. _

Much of what else he had endured, he had long since accepted. The Hunt, though - what manner of training could that possibly have been? What ‘educational’ purpose could it have had, deceiving them all, placing Martin and Georgie and Tim in danger?

The Great Twisting had been a world-ending threat, Jon had the power to stop it, and so of course it made sense for Mister Magnus to utilise him against the Spiral. That was justifiable, right. But the other Entities that had touched him, had he deserved all that too? How could he possibly? Jon had always blamed himself for happening upon the Stranger and the Corruption - but after Magnus had tried so blatantly to push him into the jaws of the Hunter, he found it impossible to believe that those encounters had not also been engineered. The Lonely, the Vast, the Dark, Magnus had ordered him to stand meek and still while each attacked him in turn. An  _ education _ , yes, but one which had him trembling and vomiting in utter blind terror for years afterwards at the memories, the nightmares; an education which could have killed him.  _ You fed me to the wolf, to the mist, to the sky, to the dark. _

The Dark, especially. He had been ten years old, and he had screamed for help and received no answer, only silent, ravenous observation. Jon had fought the Dread Powers alone, with far less power and influence than Magnus, and he knew that it was possible, even while feeding the Eye. He would not ever have left a child screaming in the dark. His gratitude to his master for saving him from it had eclipsed what he should have known even then was an injustice. No child deserved that in exchange for being kept alive, just as he had not deserved hard labour in the workhouse before for no greater crime than being poor and orphaned.

_ I don’t deserve what you’ve done to me _ , Jon asserted internally. The thought was new and bold; he had not known he was capable of it.

The further they travelled into the tunnels - far further than he would have guessed; where were they going, how expansive could the network be? - the more the power of the Eye slowly gained over that of the other Entities. It had been gradual, at first, but now Jon could feel the Watcher as intensely as he would under a spotlight or in Mister Magnus’s private office. He wanted badly to draw on its strength, to give into his terrified confusion and Ask a question - but he knew that he would receive no answer, could feel his master like a barrier between him and their patron, and he knew that it would only make Magnus angrier, so he swallowed his dread and his rebellious thoughts.

And then he saw  _ it. _

Before them, the tunnels widened and fell away into a cavern, stretching far down into jagged darkness. There was the stink of the marshes, and what looked like the debris of a natural disaster, some act of a wrathful god, buildings blown apart all at once and then left to rot far below the city. But amid the wreckage, a sole survivor stood tall: a tower, reaching up from the ruins like an outstretched hand. Whatever had destroyed its surroundings had left it carbonised but apparently otherwise undamaged, and its exterior, were it not so unnatural, would have been a marvel of art. It was flawlessly smooth and round, a column of glittering black glass, so hard and dark it appeared almost obsidian. At its head was a central observation chamber, a rotunda of wide, hungry windows reinforced by thin columns of metal and dark brick - it was this that connected to the tunnels, the gap bridged only by a short expanse of stone.

Jon had never seen it before, but he Knew it at once. He had felt it each and every day he had spent inside the Institute, had sensed it even from the first moment that he had endured Magnus’s scrutiny. This was the centre, the apex of Beholding: a torture chamber for the Eye, the ultimate, most agonising symbol of the fear of being watched, of being exposed in every secret and private moment, every second of your life laid bare for judgement and for punishment. It was a sacrificial altar for the Ceaseless Watcher. 

The Panopticon.

Magnus was still pulling him toward it, ignoring the way his apprentice had jerked back, his cold grey eyes fixed unmoving on the source of his power, bright with anticipation, exhilaration.  _ The tower _ , said Gerry’s voice in Jon’s mind,  _ chaos, destruction, disaster _ . Blind panic seized at him as he looked back and forth between them: he pulled away, wrenched his wrist out of his master’s hand, forgetting himself and all his rightful fear of Magnus at the intuitive knowledge that whatever inside that chamber was a fate worse than death by far.

“No-!”

For a brief moment Magnus’s mask slipped. That facade of civility and courtesy which he slathered on thick as stage paint disappeared, and the casual brutality which he was capable of shone through. Jon had always sensed it, a threat lurking unvoiced beneath the surface - and revealed at the first sign of rebellion, as he knew it would be.

He had no time to try and run. Magnus turned suddenly and backhanded him hard across the face, throwing him to the ground. Jon’s vision throbbed with white, coursing with shock and adrenaline, with the momentarily delayed hot sting of the strike, a line of acute pain on his cheek -  _ he must be wearing his ring _ , Jon thought, half numb, even as he attempted weakly to scramble up, still desperate to escape any way that he could. Another blow: a cruel kick to the ribs that knocked him down again, drew another gasped cry as Jon’s body curled inwards, arms flying up protectively.

From above him he heard a sharp sigh. And then he was being hauled forward with a choking grip on the back of his shirt, dragging him the last few steps toward the chamber despite his pathetic struggling and his half-formed protestations.

Magnus threw him inside the Panopticon and slammed the door after him with a resounding  _ clang _ . Even as Jon hurled himself against it from the inside, shouting, he could hear the heavy mechanism of the lock falling shut.

“No, no, no,  _ no _ -”

He could barely think, not past the pain and the fear, not through the electric, hissing power of the Eye, more intense in this place than Jon had ever felt it before. It rung loud in his ears, threatened to take him apart at the seams, to open every unnatural eye it had made within him so that he would Watch eternally, from all angles. And yet, his thoughts still raced: at first he could think only of  _ offerings _ , that he had failed somehow and was now to be sacrificed to Beholding, as the Desolation or the Dark might sacrifice a victim.

But as he raised his eyes to his master - only a little bedraggled from Jon’s resistance, grinning in vicious triumph - he Knew that this was neither a punishment nor a deviation.

This was merely what the plan had always been, what Magnus had intended for him from the beginning. It was a ritual.

Jon slumped back, shaking, too consumed by horror to look away from Magnus’s monstrous elation. Seeming to realise that all the fight had gone out of his victim, Magnus allowed his expression to return to a shuttered smirk, and ran his fingers through his hair, straightened his necktie.

“You’ve certainly given me some trouble, boy,” he purred, smiling wider at the way that Jon recoiled: here, he could feel his master’s voice reverberating inside his mind, inescapable. And he still  _ could not close his eyes. _ “But what has it come to, here at the end? What use was all that dragging your heels?”

Jon could not answer; he had no words, but even if he had, his body was held frozen. Magnus continued, pitiless.

“Of course, you know what this building is. I neglected no part of your education, philosophy least of all - though I did take pains not to speak of anything that might touch upon  _ this _ with you personally. Nonetheless, I know your tutors had you review Jeremy Bentham’s  _ inspection principle _ , his prison designs, in detail.

“Bentham had no idea what he had done. While the Eye was always present in the concept of the  _ panoptes _ , the all-seeing observer, he thought to use it to serve the Web.”

Magnus’s face twisted briefly in repugnance at the thought.

“The uninspired ambitions of an unenlightened man,” he spat, “Uninterested in terror for its own sake, to think of utilising the fear of Beholding only as a means of a control.”

His features smoothed out again - he was performing, Jon realised, putting on a show for the Eye.

“The appointment of Robert Smirke to the construction of Millbank Prison was more promising, but Smirke was a dreamer in both the figurative and literal senses, and one that far outlived his usefulness. A temple to all fears was something I could only endorse if the Eye was made foremost among them - dear Robert refused, of course, though I was still able to make my  _ adjustments  _ to his designs, ensuring the preeminence of our own patron. But I feared that he might attempt to reverse those changes, and that made me hasty. It was catastrophic.

“Neither I nor the Ceaseless Watcher were powerful enough, the first time I tried to use the Panopticon for its  _ true _ purpose, and the prison itself crumbled and fell, those first prisoners struck dead by sheer terror in their cells. Smirke and I, and the rest of our associates, had enough influence over the government to keep the whole debacle quiet, fortunately - and to convince the authorities that the wisest thing to do would not be to destroy the aftermath completely, but to hide it as quickly and cheaply as possible. That left Smirke free rein to build his oh-so-enlightened, balanced tunnels, and gave me the time I needed to lick my wounds and contemplate the flaws in my design.

“Human eyes are simply not capable of channeling the power of the observation chamber. Human minds are not qualified to comprehend what it shows them. They  _ shatter  _ beneath the truth of the Eye. It seemed a problem without a solution. But by that time, my second project, my research institute, was in its infancy in Edinburgh - and I discovered that infinitely more power was available in extracting fear second-hand from victims of other Entities than from the fear the Watcher alone can give. It comes in small increments, yes, but over time all that knowledge, all that experience, feeds the Eye far better than the simple paranoia of Something Is Looking At Me.  _ That _ was the answer. Any attempt to use the Panopticon by someone unprepared, unschooled in such matters, would always be doomed to fail - but my first Institute had given me a way to build power  _ and  _ knowledge, together.”

Magnus’s voice dropped to a hiss, his eyes gleaming with greed, his expression utterly unhinged.

“I needed a repository of every kind of human suffering, deeply familiar with all fears, ready to gorge on each horror and Know them completely. Balanced between each of our dark gods, just as the first theorists discussed. A living chronicle of terror. An archive. So I  _ made one. _

“I had you marked by each and every fear in turn - but, really, Jonathan, you’ve seemed quite determined to show me that I needn’t have gone to all the effort. You came to me already touched by the Web, and then the Desolation, the Slaughter, the End, you sought those powers out all by yourself, no coercion necessary on my part. I must admit to some considerable frustration when you managed to squirm away from the Hunt after I had spent so long helping it to stalk you. Still, that one was easy enough to abandon. What do I care for the fears of beasts?”

Magnus began to laugh, too delighted in his own terrible victory to be irritated.

“Children are so breakable. More malleable than adults, more easily controlled, but… fragile. There was always the possibility that you would die, or that your mind would simply crack open beneath the pressure, and I would have to find a new archive. Yet you lived through every trial. Survival was only half the challenge, of course: I had thought that if you made it to adulthood and still did not show the right kind of potential, then at least I finally had a viable subject on which to test my preparations to last longer than this perishable body - I would transplant your Watching eyes into another’s skull, some assistant perhaps, and see if the procedure I have devised has any merit. Or, if you grew up to be no use to the Watcher at all, I might simply have plucked out  _ your _ eyes and discarded them, and taken control of your body myself. But your  _ potential _ was never the problem, was it, Jonathan? All that curiosity, all that  _ delicious fear _ .”

He leaned even closer to the glass, so close that Jon could see every one of his features twisted in a poisonous mix of spite and glee.

“In the end, the plan worked better than I ever could have hoped: a shining little beacon of Beholding, held beneath my thumb. But then… well, you finally began to resist, and I had to speed things up - any longer and you might actually have tried to escape. It was a difficult game from the start, scaring you enough to torment, but not quite enough that you’d bolt. But you never had anything to run  _ to _ , before. If those little friends of yours were any less useful in pulling you into danger I would have disposed of them long ago. Perhaps I’ll start getting rid of them, now that you’re here.”

Any aloof, gentlemanly affect that remained on Magnus’s face melted away as he snarled,

“And you’ll have no choice but to watch.”

Every word rang with truth. From the Panopticon, Jon Knew it all as genuine with utter certainty. There was no refuge, no escape from the knowledge. He was both helpless with horror, and brightened by it, the inhuman  _ thing  _ that the End had left him gorging itself on the information he had access from this chamber.

Jon crumpled down against the black marble floor, straining to resist Beholding, to contain his transformed nature. Desperately, he covered his eyes, hands curling inwards as though to claw them out and sever the connection to his god.

But he couldn’t. His eyes were numerous now, even invisible as they were, covering every part of him: there was no way not to See, to force each of them closed.

“No,” he sobbed again - but the word jarred against his ears as a lie. Even while he fought the Ceaseless Watcher, a greater part of him rose up to embrace it. He Looked out from between his fingers and Saw everything at once, past and present, a great screaming flood of information, more than he could focus on or make sense of.

With those same creeping tendrils that Jon had felt pick through his memories earlier, Magnus insinuated himself agonisingly into Jon’s mind, forcing words into his mouth.

In a voice far too clipped to be his own, with a laugh far too cruel, he heard himself begin to speak.

“Now, Jonathan. Repeat after me.”

Jon found himself bound ever closer to the Eye, until he was nothing more than a component of it, a cog in its vast anatomy. And yet he was not close enough: he wanted it nearer, wanted it to clutch him tight, to hold the entire world within its dominion. The words to call for its embrace came to his lips even as he choked down strangled screams.

“ _ You who watch and know and understand none. You who listen and hear and will not comprehend. You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right. _ ”

A clap of thunder like a great blink; the sight of a thousand people simultaneously shuddering, glancing over their shoulders in search for what they suddenly felt Watching them.

“ _ Come to us in your wholeness. Come to us in your perfection _ .”

A wave of paranoia spreading over the world like toxic gas, and the sensation, felt collectively, of every deepest, darkest thought of every secret moment rising to the surface, being made visible like bloated corpses washed up with the tide. And it was  _ Jon  _ that saw those bodies, the Eye that examined them through him.

“ _ Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is the awful dread, bring it beneath your power: all that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and rips and dies, all to be watched, all to be known!” _

Every soul in the Institute had frozen, muscles tensed, hearts pounding - there was no move that they could make to get away from what surveilled them, no place to hide. Every servant of every other Power felt their connections waver and slip, the balance of fears shifting to make room for a new dominance.

“ ** _Come to us!_** **”** Jon screamed, and it echoed in a thousand minds. **“** ** _I open the door!_** ”

For a second, the universe hesitated, waited with baited breath for reality to be transformed.

And then the moment passed.

There was something missing, a gap in the incantation -  _ hunting _ , Jon realised, and something else, too,  _ bleeding _ . They had not touched him, and so he could not Know them, not in full; the ritual couldn’t be completed, the world would not end. Relief and disappointment warred between the two halves of him, until he was almost torn apart in the conflict between his human desires and those of the Eye. 

But fear still rushed through his open mouth, suffusing the room, flowing toward Magnus. Power burst forth like a breaking dam from Jon’s roving, rolling eyes, from the tales muttered many-layered out from his tongue.

As Jon shuddered, Magnus laughed.

The Archive and its keeper.

*

Briefly, one of the Archive’s many eyes focused on the building above it. A pair of Jon’s friends were tearing apart the room where they had cared for his body in its long sleep, a furious woman and a forsaken man. The blanket where he had laid was still warm.

_ But you were here when I left _ , exclaimed one,  _ you were watching him - _

_ I  _ **_told_ ** _ you,  _ countered the other, frustrated tears in her eyes,  _ I left  _ **_you_ ** _ here, I don’t understand how this - _

_ He can’t have just walked off! He was d- _

The lonely man pulled at his hair, choking himself off from the horrible truth he had been about to utter.

_ Jon was unconscious for a  _ **_week_ ** _ , he has to be somewhere here, u-unless - _

_ \- Unless someone - something - took him _ , agreed the woman.  _ It doesn’t make sense. _

_ I don’t understand. I don’t  _ **_know._ **

The Archive felt their lack of knowledge, their fear of every awful, infinite possibility that lurked in that expanse of confusion. But that was a fear that was closed to it, now. It no longer had the privilege of ignorance or reprieve.

Locked in the Panopticon, Jon knew  _ everything _ .

*

**fin.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- The Watcher's Crown (see: ep.160)  
> \- Abuse, past and present  
> \- Physical violence from Magnus toward Jon  
> \- Imprisonment  
> I am not Jonny Sims, this is not a tragedy!! I know this is a spoiler, but also, it's a fic: Jon is going to be _fine_ , just like, not right away. There will be a sequel.
> 
> Thank you so much for all the wonderful comments and support! I love talking to all of you, and I love talking about this verse especially!!

**Author's Note:**

> General Content Warnings:  
> \- Child abuse via The Fears  
> \- Emotional manipulation  
> \- Canon-typical content for the Fears, especially Beholding  
> \- Violence (will warn specifically when it comes up)  
> \- Period-typical misogyny, hints of other prejudice
> 
> Also - 'Lectisternium' is an ancient ceremony in which a feast is offered to the gods.


End file.
